Conditional clauses in Old Uyghur translations of Chinese Buddhist texts

Abstract

In the Old Uyghur language, conditional clauses are primarily encoded by the conditional mood marker -sAr, which does not convey explicit temporal meaning. As the Old Uyghur language evolved, a variety of conditional forms began to be used in conditional clauses, along with tense and mood markers in main clauses, to convey real, hypothetical, and counterfactual meanings. In the Old Uyghur translations of Chinese Buddhist texts, conditional clauses predominantly express realistic conditions, and the predicates of the main clauses are generally coded with the aorist suffix -(V)r/-yUr. The main clause is largely declarative, and it may also express a variety of moods through distinct syntactic devices. Furthermore, given that Chinese Buddhist texts are an important source for Old Uyghur Buddhist literature, certain features of Chinese conditional clauses have influenced Old Uyghur, resulting in adaptive code-switching driven by contact-induced factors. Therefore, this paper primarily focuses on examining the syntactic structures of conditional clauses, conducting semantic comparisons, and exploring the impact of linguistic contact between these two languages, with the aim of elucidating various manifestations of these contact effects at the syntactic level.