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In Beserman, a new converb grammaticalizes from the possessive locative form of the locative noun in (o)ń-ńig. We show that the constructions with the converb have a clausal structure, while the constructions with the locative noun are mostly noun phrases, even if they include an indication of the agent and patient of the situation encoded by the locative noun. Semantically, the two types of constructions are also different. In the converb constructions the situations encoded by the main and the embedded clause must overlap, while with locative nouns this is not necessarily the case. The temporal reference of locative nouns is habitual/iterative, while converbs often have episodic (non-habitual) interpretation. The original locative noun denotes a reference to a fixed location where the situation usually takes place. In the constructions with the converb this meaning is bleached and generalized as an action which takes place in any possible location. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article investigates Beserman constructions which contain adjectives inflected for number and nouns that they modify semantically. Prototypically adjectives do not show agreement in number with the head noun. Under certain circumstances, however, they may be marked for number by a nominal plural suffix ‑(j)os and a 3Sg possessive marker, or by a predicative adjectival suffix ‑(j)eś. Elicitation and corpus data show that constructions with the suffix ‑(j)os and a 3Sg possessive marker are used in contrastive contexts. As for -(j)eś-marked adjectives, we claim that two types of construction should be distinguished. Postposed -(j)eś-marked adjectives, according to syntactic tests, retain their original predicative properties. Preposed -(j)eś-marked adjectives share important properties with "prototypical" attributes in Beserman, and may be used under various information structure conditions, thus drifting towards holding the status of pure agreement constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of this paper is case compounding, i.e. attachment of multiple case markers to a noun stem, in Beserman Udmurt, which we also briefly compare to Literary Udmurt. Almost all types of case compounding as described by Noonan (2008) are attested in the language, however derivational compounding and compounding due to suspended affixation only play a marginal role. We use referential communication experiments and corpus data to analyze the constraints on this phenomenon. We also argue that possessive marking, which is often said to be obligatory in compounding (e.g. Alatyrev 1983: 586, Winkler 2001: 43), is in fact triggered by informational-structural factors that are associated with compounding, rather than by compounding itself. The paper is based primarily on the data that we collected in the field in 2003-2017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]