Balkar X-marking: a change in progress

Abstract

This paper explores patterns of morphological expressions employed by Balkar language (Turkic language spoken by ca. 300K people in Russia) to mark contexts of X-marking (von Fintel & Iatridou 2020): counterfactual conditionals, weak necessity modals, and counterfactual desires. The main oddity of Balkar with respect to X-marking is that its X-marking system appears to be transforming into a system without antecedent X-marking. The theoretical implications of this pattern are explored in this paper.