Modal constructions in the Volga-Kama sprachbund: an areal and diachronic study

• Applicant: Dr. Aigul Zakirova
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages ; Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 556302231

The aim of this project is to investigate the historical evolution of modal constructions in the languages of the Volga-Kama sprachbund. The project will rely on both present-day data and historical sources. Modal constructions are expressions that convey meanings related to necessity (e.g., English "I have to go," "Thou shalt not steal," "This must be Fred") and possibility (e.g., "She can speak French," "They may refuse"). The Volga-Kama sprachbund includes languages from two unrelated families: Turkic (Tatar, Bashkir and Chuvash) and Uralic (Moksha, Erzya, Meadow Mari, Hill Mari, Udmurt and Beserman). These languages are spoken in the Middle Volga region in Russia and share many features in morphology, syntax and lexicon due to intensive contact between them. Modal constructions in the Volga-Kama languages are highly diverse, more so than the modal verbs in English or German. Therefore, it is essential to study not only the various meanings related to necessity and possibility but also the syntactic changes in these constructions. This project has three main objectives: 1) Establish the inventory of modal constructions for each Volga-Kama language: a) Collect examples from linguistic corpora of present-day languages, my own field data and historical sources (e.g., 19th-century translations of religious literature and oral texts from the late 19th and early 20th centuries). b) Use statistical methods to create inventories of constructions and describe them in terms of predefined features. 2) Describe the historical evolution of these modal constructions: a) Compare the identified constructions to each other and to non-modal constructions with similar features. b) Reconstruct the development of one modal construction into another or into a non-modal construction (or the development of a non-modal construction into a modal one), and describe the accompanying syntactic changes. 3) Compare these findings to existing literature and consider the new evidence from several perspectives: a) Assess whether the new data challenges existing generalizations on possible changes in meanings; b) Analyze the structure of the modal constructions of the Volga-Kama languages, e.g. whether there is a modal verb, suffix or particle, what is the case marking of the subject and the object, etc. c) Examine modal constructions from the perspective of language contact: what types of constructions tend to be borrowed from one language to another? Is a construction borrowed as it is or does it change in the new language? Which of the Volga-Kama languages have similar constructions and which languages differ in this respect from the others? As a result of the project, a database of modal constructions in the Volga-Kama languages will be created and at least two articles will be submitted to linguistic journals.

• DFG Programme: WBP Position