In 1987, Ning Chunyan and I were able to spend a few hours doing “field work” on Dagur while I was teaching briefly at Heilongjiang University in Harbin. I was interested in doing work on any language that might be available at that time, and we were fortunate to meet three speakers of a language we came to know by the name of Daur (Dáwò’er). Neither of us had any knowledge of Mongolian, and so
... [Show full abstract] during the time we were actually eliciting material in the language, all we knew about it was its Chinese name, though we determined that it was an Altaic language upon hearing the first few sentences. Later, we found Zhong Shu Chun’s small but excellent Dawo’er Yu Jian Zhi ( Brief Record of the Dagur Language (1963)) in the Hei Da library, and after returning to MIT, I found Samuel Martin’s useful Dagur Mongolian Grammar, Texts, and Lexicon (1961). In relation to the matter to be discussed here, the material we elicited departs somewhat from Martin’s findings but is in close accord with the material found in Zhong’s grammar. The construction with which I will be concerned here is illustrated by the following sentence (all examples are from field notes unless otherwise noted): 1
