The la-form: Russian verbs in Nanai speech

• Published in: Eesti ja soome-ugri keeleteaduse ajakiri. Journal of Estonian and Finno-Ugric Linguistics
• Main Authors: Oskolskaya, Sofia, Stoynova, Natasha
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Tartu 2013
• Subjects: language contact; code-switching; endangered languages; borrowings; verbal morphology; Russian; Nanai; Tungusic languages
• Online Access: http://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/jeful/article/view/jeful.2013.4.2.05; https://doi.org/10.12697/jeful.2013.4.2.05

Nanai speakers who are fluent both in Nanai and Russian use verb forms with a Russian root and the suffix -la (called further “la-forms”) in their speech. The status of -la is under question: on the one hand, it resembles the Russian past tense form (-l), on the other hand, it can be interpreted as the Nanai derivational suffix -la/-lə, which is used in Standard Nanai for the verbalization of nouns. We argue that in modern Nanai this case turns out to be a complicated one, and that la-forms are maintained due to their links with both of these sources.