Simulative constructions in Tatyshly Udmurt

The article deals with simulative constructions meaning ‘pretend to do something’ in Tatyshly Udmurt. We mainly use the data collected during fieldwork as well as the corpus of oral narratives and information on simulative constructions in Standard Udmurt found in previous studies. In Tatyshly Udmurt, there are several strategies to express simulative meaning: a synthetic one (using the suffix -mn’äs’k) and two analytic strategies (with the verbs karis’kə̑nə̑ ‘be done, become’ and lu̇ə̈nə̈ ‘be, become’). We compare the strategies according to the parameters of variation cited in the typological literature: the base form that attaches the simulative marker; (in)transitivity of the simulative predicate; (in)animacy of the subject. We also consider the semantic shifts of simulative derivations into the domain of scalarity: an attenuative meaning of the constructions with -mn’äs’k and karis’kə̑nə̑, as well as an attemptive meaning close to the attenuative one and a neglective interpretation of the forms with -mn’äs’k. As for the construction with the verb lu̇ə̈nə̈, we reveal the possibility of its simulative interpretation in secondary predication with a converb lu̇sa. We show that such a meaning appears in a limited number of subject-oriented contexts, in which an emotional state, result state, or life stage is described. We suggest additional morphosyntactic parameters that may be relevant for further language-specific and typological studies of simulative constructions: negation scope, availability of (non)coreferential subjects in biclausal constructions, and indexical shift in the dependent clause. We discuss both the general grammatical acceptability of these strategies and idiolect variation in their use.