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Case Forms, Participles, Converbs and Causatives: Morphological Means of Expressing Causality in Modern Karakalpak

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Karakalpak, like other Turkic languages, can express a causal relation inside a single word form: an ablative ending turns fear into the source of silence, a participle with -lıqtan turns an event into an explicit reason, and a causative affix turns a subject into someone who makes another person act. These forms are among the most frequent means of expressing causality in Karakalpak prose, yet they are usually described one by one, and often as if each affix carried a fixed meaning. This article examines the morphological means of expressing cause and effect in modern Karakalpak (case endings, participles, converbs, verbal nouns, possessive and negative markers, and causative-voice affixes) on the basis of grammatical descriptions and examples from A. Najimov's work on complex sentences and T. Qayıpbergenov's novel Qaraqalpaq dástanı. Maman biy ápsanası. Using contextual, transformational and functional-semantic analysis, it shows that causal meaning in these forms arises not from the affix alone but from the interaction of the form with predicate semantics, the relation between subjects, factivity, tense-aspect and context. The study distinguishes "relational causation" (a causal link between two predicative situations) from "action causation" (a causer built into the argument structure of a single verb), proposes criteria for separating cause from time and purpose in polysemous forms such as -ǵannan keyin, -ǵan soń and -ǵanı ushın, and arranges the forms on a scale of explicitness. The scientific novelty lies in the first integrated classification of Karakalpak morphological and non-finite causal forms by degree of explicitness and field position.
DOI: 10.51699/2dvgk313
Language: English
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7222323318
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