Semantics of subordinate conjunctions in the oral speech of upperand low-insular Altai German dialects

The aim of this paper is to describe the functioning specificity of subordinate conjunctions in the oral speech of upper- and low-insular Altai German dialects. It is based on the practical material gathered during dialectological expeditions to German villages of the Altai Krai in 2003-2013 using the methods of comparison and context analysis. Conjunctions in the Altai German dialects, as well as in the literary German language, possess no nominative function, but are used to create and specify coordinate and subordinate syntactic relations between words and sentences. They possess a variety of forms in the upper- and low-insular Altai German dialects because of their phonetic peculiarities, presence of relict forms and close contacts with the Russian language. The semantics of the subordinate conjunctions in the dialects under study is not as diverse as in the literary German language, but they have a certain number of meanings they express. Some of them are highly specialized, monosemantic: "weil", "hotj", "solange", while the others are polysemantic: "wi", "wo", "tass / daut / dot". The polysemantic conjunctions can introduce different subordinate clauses, their actual meaning is realized in context. The author of the article describes the main semantic groups of subordinate conjunctions in the insular Altai German dialects, reveals the most common subordinating conjunction in every group and analyzes their main features. In the article the subordinate conjunctions are grouped in 9 classes according the relationships they express: temporal and conditional conjunction, conjunction of reason and purpose, consecutive, concessive, comparison, attributive and object conjunctions. The analysis of practical material reveals similarities and differences between subordinate conjunctions in the contemporary literary German language and the dialects on the territory of Germany and hypotaxis constructions in oral German speech. The author comes to a conclusion that the system of coordinate conjunctions in the dialects under study is not a closed word-class: influenced by the Russian language, the dialects borrow new elements, which opens a wide scope for further research.

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