The speech-introducing verb ‘gikh’ (Mong. ‘gekhe’) plays a very important role in Mongolic languages; and due to expressed polysemanticity, its participial forms can act not only as link-verbs within complex sentences but also as functional words with other functions. The article examines quantitative data, meaning and functions of the speech-introducing (‘dicendial’) verb ‘gikh’ with evidence from texts of the Kalmyk heroic epic of Djangar. The research is based on 28 available songs enlisted in the Kalmyk National Corpus database and processed with TextAnalyzer program. The dicendial verb ‘gikh’ has 80 grammatical forms most frequently used of which are the following: gij (gijl), giγӓd, giv, gidg, giv (givl), ginӓ (ginӓl). Verbal forms of ‘gikh proper and its participial forms can – due to polysemanticity – act not only as link-verbs within complex sentences but also as functional words with other functions. Being changeable functional words, the diverse forms of the verb largely contribute to formation of lexical-grammatical meanings of words they are related to, introduce and stress various modal aspects which are numerous enough.

Keywords: epic “Djangar”, verb, dicendial verb, conjunctions, quantitative analysis.

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