Locational and directional relations and tense and aspect marking in Chalkan, a South Siberian Turkic language
This paper gives an overview of South Siberian Turkic biverbal constructions with auxiliary verbs of existence, location, posture and motion and their grammaticalization ways. Their lexical component bears markers of non-finite verb forms; their auxiliary component gets finite morphology. They produce numerous actional (Aktionsart), modality and tense-aspect-modus (TAM) forms in South Siberian Turkic languages. We argue that many modern TAM forms in these languages go back to synthesized biverbal constructions and describe processes of their grammaticalization from actional forms to aspect-temporal ones in Chalkan, an unwritten Turkic variety spoken in the north of Republic Altai, Russia. This research is based on a Chalkan electronic database that was created as a result of a Russian-German co-operation project.