Aspectotemporal connectivity in Turkic

The paper deals with connectivity phenomena relevant for construing and subdividing Turkic texts, particularly the ways in which aspect, actionality and tense interact to connect utterances. The issues addressed include aspectotemporal discourse types as textual cooccurrence patterns, the contribution of aspectotemporal items to the expression of taxis, and serialization by means of non-modifying converbial junctors in periodic chain sentences, where long series of predications represent events of equal thematic ranks. While periodic chain sentences were typical of the narrative styles of older non‑Europeanized Turkic varieties, their modern use is strongly limited. The dominant modern written registers construct texts according to patterns in which subordination strongly covaries with modification. This linguistic Europeanization has led to considerable atrophy of Turkic converbial syntax.

Published online: 05 June 2007
https://doi.org/10.1075/hsm.5.12joh