Kamas bāzoʔ ‘again’

Abstract

This article is an attempt to capture the functional profile of the Kamas repetitive adverb bazoʔ, which occurs with the four different meanings ‘again’, ‘in addition’, ‘in turn’, and ‘back again’. The adverb is a borrowing from South Siberian Turkic. It is attested across all documented periods of Kamas. In the latest period, the profile of the adverb changes at least in two domains. First, in repeated events with a differing given argument, the adverb finds a competitor in the Russian borrowing tože ‘also’. Second, while a repetitive-restitutive meaning is attested already in earlier texts, in late Kamas, bazoʔ appears also in counterdirectional meaning, which had been expressed earlier by the spatial adverb püʔdə ‘back’. For the present investigation all ca. 200 instances of bazoʔ in the older and younger Kamas texts have been considered. In addition to bazoʔ and tože, attention is also paid to another additive operator of Russian origin, iššo ‘still, more’.