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On Diversity and Complexity of Languages Spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia
Edited by Pirkko Suihkonen and Lindsay J. Whaley
[Studies in Language Companion Series 164] 2014
► pp. 221–250

Non-past copular markers in Turkish

ORCID logo | Uppsala University

The present paper aims to investigate non-past copular markers in modern Standard Turkish from a comparative point of view. The following markers are analysed by taking into account their semantic, discursive and clausal properties as a whole: (1) the simple subject markers of pronominal type, including the zero realization in third person; (2) the enclitic -DIr developed from a verbal copular predication; (3) the copular markers olur and oluyor consisting of the verb ol- ‘to be(come)’ and the non-past forms -(V)r or (Ø)Iyor, respectively. The underlying research questions are: (1) What semantic contents are inherently denoted by the respective copular strategies? (2) Are there any preferences and/or restrictions in the combinability of these copular markers with subject and predicate nouns, as well as with other clausal elements? (3) Is there any distributional relation between the copular markers and the semantic types of their copular clauses? (4) What are the discursive and pragmatic properties of these copular forms? The analysis suggests that the enclitic -DIr functions as a propositional stance marker, while olur and oluyor mainly operate on predicational level, though they occur as stance markers in special pragmatic constellations.

Keywords: discourse, non-past copular marker, semantics, stance marker, subject and predicate noun, Turkish
Published online: 17 December 2014
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.164.08kar
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