Semantics of Buryat adverbial clauses and linguistic worldview

This paper presents some results of of research on the system of adverbial clauses in Buryat as it reflects some elements of the national ‘linguistic picture of the world’. Buryat (as well as other Mongolian languages) is characterized by an unusually large number of constructions with adverbial clauses in practically all semantic types; this suggests some additional semantic features that are not, or less consistently, coded in better-known European languages. Our analysis has shown that the relations between events in Buryat are expressed not only neutrally, but with two additional types of features: a regular correlation of described relations with social norms and individual expectations (‘in accordance with’ vs. ‘against norms/expectations’), as well as evaluation (‘neutral’ vs. ‘evaluated by the speaker: qualitatively, quantitatively, or pragmatically’). It means that such important elements of the national worldview like social norms and values or dynamic scenarios for natural and social events are coded also on the syntactic level