Areal features of copula sentences in Karaim as spoken in Lithuania

The paper deals with copula clauses in Karaim, a highly endangered Kipchak Turkic language spoken in Lithuania. Karaim has been dominated by the non-Turkic (Baltic and Slavic) languages of the area. Though Karaim has acquired many properties not typical of Turkic it has preserved its Turkic morphological inventory to the extent that typical Turkic categories are still marked by genuine Turkic formatives (Csató 2012, 2013). Notwithstanding this remarkable sustainability, the paper demonstrates how selective copying has in many cases changed morphosyntactic properties of the copula clauses. The contact-induced features are analyzed in the Code-Copying Model (Johanson 2002).

• Affiliations: 1: Uppsala University