Word-formation means of expressing the category of quantity in Russian and Bashkir: a contrastive study

The purpose of the study is to identify universal and language-specific features in the representation of quantitative meanings in agglutinative Bashkir, compared with inflectional Russian, by examining compensatory strategies. The article considers Russian suffixal and prefixal derivatives alongside the affixal and prefixal means and paired words used in Bashkir. The work analyzes the categories of singularity, diminutiveness, augmentativeness, collectivity, excess, intensity of action, and multiplicity. The scientific novelty lies in the initial systematization of these means with due regard for the typological distance between the languages. The study finds that, despite identical semantic content, the means of expression differ substantially. Russian has a well-developed system of specialized suffixes for conveying nuances of quantity and prefixes for expressing verbal aspectual meanings such as accumulation, repetition, and attenuation. Bashkir, lacking a comparable system of derivational affixes for intensifying or attenuating an action, compensates through a variety of case and number forms, extensive use of paired words, and contextual means. These findings offer deeper insight into how grammar and word formation interact in languages with different structural types.