Basic pain terms in Beserman Udmurt

This paper is devoted to semantic structure and syntactic properties of predicates of pain in Beserman Udmurt. Beserman is a variety of Udmurt spoken in northwestern Udmurtia, which has undergone contact infl uence of Russian dialects and of Turkic languages. We analyze meanings and compatibility of units which denote pain, describe grammatical encoding of diff erent participants of the situation of pain — the experiencer, the body part where pain is located, and the cause of pain. We consider the following parameters to be relevant for encoding the situation of pain in Beserman Udmurt: type of experiencer, location of pain and its cause (including a human making someone feel pain), pure pain vs. pain accompanied by functionality loss, physical pain vs. painful emotions, intensity of pain and its type. We compare Beserman Udmurt data with those from idioms which either are closely related to Udmurt genetically or are in the situation of close contact with it — namely, with the data from Komi-Zyrian, certain Russian dialects, and Turkic languages. We show that unlike Komi-Zyrian, its relative, Beserman Udmurt encodes diff erent types of pain on the lexical level (i. e. by verbal roots and ideophones), not on the grammatical one (i. e. through morphological derivation). In this respect, Beserman Udmurt resembles certain Turkic languages. The diversity of argument encoding in expressions of pain is a common trait of Beserman Udmurt and Komi-Zyrian; it seems to be supported by the infl uence of Russian dialects.