Some tendencies in the functioning of deverbal nouns (lexical nominalizations) in the modern Evenki

The paper deals with derivational processes: meaning and syntactic functions of deverbal nouns in the literary and spoken Evenki. Three affixes are considered: - kīt (nominalization with the meaning of the place of the action, or of an abstract action), -ďĀk (nominalization with the meaning of the place of the action), and -wūn (derived nouns with -wūn have the meaning of the result of the action, of the instrument, an abstract noun meaning, etc.). It is mentioned in grammars and vocabularies that -kīt shows a quite regular polysemy ‘place of action' vs ‘abstract noun'; This polysemy is based on real uses in newspapers (the ‘abstract noun' meanings found in the texts are often not listed in the dictionaries). The affix -ďĀk can have only the ‘place of action' meaning in both written and spoken texts. The affix -wūn has a lot of nominal meaning; the ‘abstract noun' meaning is found both in the literary and in the spoken language. This meaning is widely mentioned in dictionaries and grammars. All of the three affixes occur in the prenominal adjective / modifier position with the modification function. Cases of functioning of these three affixes as adjectives / modifiers are hardly mentioned in the dictionaries, and especially in the grammars, whereas you can find the nouns with -ďĀk, -kīt, -wūn in the noun modifier function in literary texts regularly. In this function, the nominalization loses important morphological properties of a noun, such as ability to bear a possessive or reflexive affix. The nominalization in the noun modifier position can optionally agree with the noun it modifies in case and/or number: this is a characteristic feature of Evenki adjectives. In spoken texts, we have found only -wūn nominals in the modifier position; overall, these nominals demonstrate case/gender agreement more often than nominals with -kīt and -ďĀk. We can conclude that the modifier use of deverbal nouns with - wūn and especially with -ďĀk and -kīt as adjectives is an innovation, and that the spoken Evenki preserves more archaic grammar rules than the newspaper (literary) language. These data also confirm the claims of G. M Vasilevich and I. Nikolaeva that nouns and adjectives are not two distinct categories in Evenki: they are not fully differentiated neither in the lexicon, nor in grammar. Not only a considerable amount of stems are, following G. M. Vasilevich, “undifferentiated”, or under-differentiated, but the number of such affixes is also increasing.