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Part of
Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 121–154

Subject marking of -DIK/-(y)AcAK complement clauses in written Turkish of the late Ottoman period (1860–1914)

| University of Oxford

This article examines an aspect of morphosyntactic change in late Ottoman Turkish on the basis of extracts from published prose texts of various genres dating from 1861 to 1911. The phenomenon under investigation is the presence or absence of genitive marking on the subjects of complement clauses whose verb is a -DIK/-(y)AcaK nominalization. Texts of the late Ottoman period show considerably less genitive marking in this context than is required in Modern Standard Turkish (MST). I sought to identify (a) the extent to which my data set diverged from MST in this respect and (b) the factors (transitivity, animacy, definiteness) that seem to have influenced the evolution that eventually produced the quite well-defined patterns of today’s usage.

Keywords: late Ottoman Turkish, morphosyntactic change, complement clause, subject marking, referential status, genitive case marking
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Aim and basis of the investigation
  • 3.Methodology
  • 4.Description of the text corpus examined
  • 5.Analysis of the data
    • 5.1Areas of overlap with Modern Standard Turkish
      • 5.1.1Complement clauses whose subject is a noun clause
      • 5.1.2Complement clauses with unmarked indefinite subjects in immediately preverbal position
    • 5.2Definite NP subjects
    • 5.3Animacy
    • 5.4Generic subjects
    • 5.5Transitivity of the -DIK/-(y)AcAK nominalized verb
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 15 July 2020
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https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.05ker
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