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Paper abstract:

In a conversation, speakers need to make the objects/people they are talking about (referents) concrete for interlocutors. This can be achieved through relative clauses (RCs). The relative clause in (1) isolates and identifies one specific referent from a group, while the RC in (2) adds a commentary about a referent that is already identified.

1. The class [that I attended yesterday] was interesting.

2. My aunt, [who lives in Almaty], came to visit me.

Traditionally, studies on RCs focus on formal syntactic properties, either in a language-specific (McCawley, 1981) or cross-linguistic perspective (Andrews, 2007). However, recent research suggests that speakers make systematic decisions about which form of RCs to use based on their judgment of the interlocutor’s state of knowledge (Fox and Thompson, 2007).

In this paper, we apply an interactional approach to the study of relative clauses in Kazakh (Turkic). We account for the distribution and patterns of use of RCs in everyday Kazakh conversations through the analysis of 6 naturally occurring informal conversations (3 hours). Contrary to traditional grammatical accounts, our analysis indicates that Kazakh speakers use two types of RC constructions. A Turkic-type construction (3), which exhibits a gap, a common relativization strategy found across the languages of the Turkic family, and an Indo-European-type construction (4), which employs a relative pronoun (kotorıy), a relativization strategy that is typical of the Indo-European family.

3. Ol [satıp alğan] qarmalar öŋkey däw eken.

“All the karma breads [that he bought] were apparently very big.”

4. Wnïversïtette küşti vraç bar, [kotorıy atın bilmeymin men].

“There is a great doctor at university, [whose name I do not know].”

Our data suggest that Kazakh speakers have developed an Indo-European-type of relativization strategy under the influence of Russian. The addition of this strategy to the system caused a shift in the meaning of each construction. While Turkic-type constructions (3) take on the function of restricting the referent (cf. 1), Indo-european-type constructions (4) specialize their meaning to supplying additional information or commentary about a referent (cf. 2).

These findings link grammar to interaction and uncover the sociocultural underpinnings of language use. Firstly, they demonstrate the importance of observing linguistic structures in their interactional context and not as a set of syntactic features in isolation. Secondly, they suggest that contact-induced language change is not a purely linguistic phenomenon, but rather a development with far-reaching implication for the social organization and management of interactions in a culture.