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Article published In:
Sign Language & Linguistics
Vol. 24:2 (2021) ► pp.182–225

Marking various aspects in Turkish Sign Language

bı̇t (‘finish’) and ‘bn’

| Purdue University
| Purdue University

Sign languages have been reported to have manual signs that function as perfective morphemes (Fischer & Gough 1999; Meir 1999; Rathmann 2005; Duffy 2007; Zucchi et al. 2010). Turkish Sign Language (TİD) has also been claimed to have such morphemes (Zeshan 2003; Kubuş & Rathmann 2009; Dikyuva 2011; Gökgöz 2011; Karabüklü 2016) as well as a nonmanual completive marker (‘bn’) (Dikyuva 2011). This study shows that the nonmanual ‘bn’ is in fact a perfective morpheme. We examine its compatibility with different event types and furthermore show that TİD has a manual sign bı̇t (‘finish’) that is indeed the completive marker but with possibly unusual restrictions on its use. Based on their distribution, the current study distinguishes bı̇t and ‘bn’ as different morphemes even though they can co-occur. TİD is argued to be typologically different from other sign languages since it has both a nonmanual marker (‘bn’) for a perfective morpheme and a manual sign (bı̇t) with different selectional properties than the manual signs reported for other sign languages.

Keywords: Turkish Sign Language (TİD), aspect morphemes, perfectivity, event types, nonmanual markers
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous studies on bı̇t and ‘bn’
  • 3.Data sources
    • 3.1Existing data / corpus data
    • 3.2Elicited data: Production and judgment tasks
      • 3.2.1Participants
      • 3.2.2Materials
      • 3.3.3Procedure
    • 3.4Summary
  • 4.General overview of bı̇t and ‘bn’
    • 4.1Different functions of bı̇t
    • 4.2Various structures in which ‘bn’ occurs
  • 5.Temporal features of bı̇t and ‘bn’
    • 5.1Reichenbach’s definition of tense
    • 5.2Testing bı̇t and ‘bn’
  • 6.Negating bı̇t and ‘bn’
    • 6.1Negative hı̇ç
    • 6.2‘ap’
    • 6.3Summary of analyses of hı̇ç and ‘ap’
  • 7.Aspectual features of bı̇t and ‘bn’
    • 7.1Perfectivity and telicity
    • 7.2Aspectual properties of bı̇t
      • 7.2.1 bı̇t introducing [res] to the event
    • 7.3Aspectual properties of ‘bn’
    • 7.4Does ‘subject’ play a role in the acceptability of bı̇t and ‘bn’?
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sll.20006.kar
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