Lexical Intensifiers in the Buryat Language
Scientific novelty. It is one of the first scientific researches of the category of intensity and the means of its expression in the Buryat language with functional and semantic approach. The aim of the study is a functional-semantic analysis of lexical means of intensity. Tasks: establishing the semantic field of the category of intensity; identification and systematization of lexical means of expression included in the field of the category under study; identification of ways of formation and analysis of the meanings of words-intensifiers; solution of some controversial issues of partof-speech attribution of words-intensifiers. Research methods: descriptive, semantic and contextual analysis. Results. It was found that in the Buryat language the most frequently used intensifier is the adjective еhe ‘big, very’. Other adjectives that frequently used as intensifiers are: emotive adjectives often with negative semantics (muuhai goyo ‘terribly beautiful’); color naming adjectives (hara ‘black’ bagahaa ‘from an early (lit. black) age’, hүhe ‘blue’, ulaan ‘red’); adjectives and participles with a negative affix -gui which gives the meaning of denial of reasonableness or boundaries (argagui ‘very’, үzegdөөgui ‘unprecedented’, unseen’ (үzehe - to see). Other parts of speech also can play a role of adverbs-intensifiers: gerund of the degree of action with affix - hysa, -sa (shadakhysa ‘with all my might’, yalaisa ‘till shine’), adverbs of the limit with affix -tar (unatar ‘until it falls’); numerals expressing an indefinite plurality (dala myangan alyaahan ‘many (lit. seventy thousand) flies’); pronouns (yamar goyo ‘what a beautiful’, iime haihan ‘so nice’); nouns (shuluun hatuu ‘hard as a stone’). The multifunctional particle -l or le can both enhance the meaning of intensifiers (ehe-l amzhaltatai ‘very successful’) and act as an amplifier on its own (tүrөөr le ‘very quickly’). The functional-semantic analysis of the corpus material allowed to reveal additional meanings of some words, for example, the intensifying meaning of the word odool, as well as to shed light on the part-of-speech attribution of some words.