Cover not available
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
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.05ker
References (12)
References
Brendemoen, Bernt. 2014. The late Ottoman use of the infinitives in -mA and -mAklIk. Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi 2014(2): 25–35.Google Scholar
Dede, Müşerref. 1986. Definiteness and referentiality in Turkish verbal sentences. In Studies in Turkish Linguistics [Typological Studies in Language 8], Dan Isaac Slobin & Karl Zimmer (eds), 147–163. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Deny, Jean. 1941. Türk Dili Grameri (Osmanlı Lehçesi), Ali Ulvi Elöve (tr. and ed.). Istanbul: Maarif Vekâleti.Google Scholar
Erguvanlı Taylan, Eser. 1994. Yantümcelerde Tamlayan Ekinin İşlevi Üzerine. Dilbilim Araştırmaları 1994: 31–41.Google Scholar
Findley, Carter V. 1980. Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire. The Sublime Porte, 1789–1922. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Göksel, Aslı & Kerslake, Celia. 2005. Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Haig, Geoffrey. 1998. Relative Constructions in Turkish. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.Google Scholar
Kerslake, Celia. 1998. La construction d’une langue nationale sortie d’un vernaculaire impérial enflé: La transformation stylistique et conceptuelle du turc ottoman. In Langues et pouvoir. De l’Afrique du Nord à l’Extrême-Orient, Salem Chaker (ed.), 129–138. Aix-en-Provence: Edisud.Google Scholar
Nilsson, Birgit. 1985. Case Marking Semantics in Turkish. Stockholm: Department of Linguistics, University of Stockholm.Google Scholar
Prokosch, Erich. 1980. Studien zur Grammatik des Osmanisch-Türkischen unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Vulgarosmanisch-Türkischen. Freiburg: Klaus Schwarz Verlag.Google Scholar
Trask, Robert Lawrence. 1996. Historical Linguistics. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Tura, Sabahat Sansa. 1986. Definiteness and referentiality in Turkish nonverbal sentences. In Studies in Turkish Linguistics [Typological Studies in Language 8], Dan Isaac Slobin & Karl Zimmer (eds), 165–194. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar