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An Analytical Description of Turkish
Introduction
The following grammatical sketch is a description of the Turkish language. Turkish is a member
of the Oghuz group of the Turkic family, being the most widely spoken of the Turkic languages,
with around 80 million speakers. It is the national language of Turkey, also having minority
groups of speakers in Bulgaria, Austria, Greece, Iraq, and a few other nations. My goal is to use
my findings to create a comprehensive overview of Turkish and its phonology, morphology, and
syntax.
The speaker that I consulted to collect the following data grew up in the United States but spoke
Turkish as their first language, being taught by a native-speaking parent. The speaker is
bilingual, with native proficiency in English and Turkish. We held three total sessions, in which
the speaker was asked to state and transcribe translations to various English sentences, with the
purpose of collecting data on each of the desired categories listed above.
Phonology
Before beginning the discussion of Turkish phonetics, I must acknowledge that my research and
description is limited only to natural Turkish words, as loanwords seem to introduce a number of
complications to my conclusions. Having said that, Turkish syllables can range from one to four
phonemes in length, but can only contain one vowel. I have identified a total of twenty-eight
phonemes, broken into eight vowels and twenty consonants. My language consultant assisted me
by writing down the Turkish alphabet and pronouncing each letter one at a time, while I
associated the letters with their phonetic classes. There are strict rules that determine where
certain phonemes can be used, based on the other phonemes found nearby.
Vowels
Turkish has front and back vowels, with both categories being broken into high and low.
Furthermore, they are separated into unrounded and rounded vowels, making the Turkish vowel
system three dimensional. For example, there could be a high, unrounded, front vowel. There are
specific restraints placed on the available vowels, as there are no mid vowels or central vowels.
The catalog of the IPA transcriptions of each vowel and how they are written in the Turkish
alphabet, seen in parentheses, are in table one.
Table 1: Turkish Vowel Classifications and IPA Counterparts
Front Unrounded
Front Rounded
Back Unrounded
Back Rounded
High
i (i)
y (ü)
ɯ (ı)
u (u)
Low
e (e)
œ (ö)
a (a)
o (o)
Given these vowels, I wanted to decipher if there were any rules for why a word may contain
front vowels or back vowels. I asked my consultant to translate a number of English sentences,
and hand-picked some of the multi-syllable and multi-vowel words. When I inspected the words
that had suffixes attached, it appeared that the suffixes were appearing in different forms. I have
compiled some of these words in table two.
Table 2: Examples of Vowel Harmony
Front Vowels harmony
Back Vowels harmony
Telefonlar (telephones)
Mutluyum (I am happy)
öfkeli (furious)
Kediler (cats)
Sözsüz (without a word)
Masada (on the desk)
Sürücü (driver)
Odaya (to the room)
Based on this data, one can see that when a suffix is added to a word, the vowel of the suffix
must match with the last vowel of the original word. The consonants in the word appear to have
no effect on the vowels. This linguistic phenomenon is known as Vowel Harmony. One
exception that should be noted is vowel harmony with verb conjugations and tenses. As you will
see later in the morphological description, my data shows that vowel harmony does not seem to
affect verb endings in the same way as in other suffixes. It appears that some verb ending
suffixes are unchangeable, meaning they do not abide by the rules of vowel harmony, while
others will change only their first vowel. However, all suffixes that are added to nouns, to the
extent of my knowledge, will strictly follow the vowel harmony rule.
Consonants
Table 3: Turkish Consonants Represented in IPA
Bilabial
Stop
Fricative
Lab Dent
Dental Post-alveolar Palatal
Voiced
b
d
(ɟ)
g
Voiceless
p
t
(c)
k
Voiced
v
z
ʒ
Voiceless
f
s
ʃ
Nasal
m
Tap/Flap
l
Voiced
ʤ
Voiceless
tʃ
ɾ
Glottal
h
n
Approx.
Affricate
Velar
j
Not shown in the chart, there is a phoneme/letter ‘ğ’ whose pronunciation changes in specific
contexts. It can (at least) be pronounced as a bilabial glide or it can be silent depending on the
surrounding letters. However, I was unable to thoroughly study these contexts within the extent
of my research, as my language consultant was unfamiliar with the specifics of the phoneme.
With further research, I may be able to gather more information about it.
There are two consonant allophones that I have identified, seen in parentheses above. The first of
these is the voiceless velar stop ‘k’, which is pronounced as a voiceless palatal stop ‘c’ when
next to a front vowel. Similarly, the voiced velar stop ‘g’ is replaced by ‘ɟ’, the voiced palatal
stop, when adjacent to a front vowel.
I also noted that when choosing between ‘d’ (voiced dental stop) and ‘t’ (voiceless dental stop)
in a word, there seems to be an occurrence similar to Vowel Harmony. The voiced ‘d’ will be
preferred if it follows another voiced consonant, while the voiceless ‘t’ follows voiceless
consonants. An example of this can be seen in the words ‘evden’ (‘from the house’) and ‘safta’
(‘in line’) as translated by my consultant. In ‘evden’, the voiced labiodental fricative ‘v’ precedes
the voiced dental stop ‘d’, while in ‘safta’ the voiceless dental stop ‘t’ comes after the voiceless
labiodental fricative ‘f’. I am curious if this applies to other consonants as well.
Word stress/accent
Though I cannot include sound files to support my claims about where stress is placed in Turkish
words, I believe that stress is on the last syllable of words, with only one stress per word. This
was the case for the overwhelming majority of words that my consultant pronounced. Some of
these words include: ‘erkek’ (‘man’), ‘kadın’ (‘woman’), and ‘evden’ (‘from the house’). There
was a single case in which I discovered that the stress was placed on a non-final syllable, which
was the word ‘epeski’ (‘very old’). However, as this was the only example of this non-final
stress that I found, I am unsure if there is a specific rule for why this occurred. ‘Epeski’ is
formed by adding the infix morpheme ‘pe’ in between syllables in the word stem ‘eski’ (‘old’).
Therefore, a possible explanation is that stress must be placed on the infixed syllable, and placed
on the last syllable in the absence of an infix. It is also possible that this pattern of stress is
specific to the dialect of my speaker, and that stress is realized differently in different parts of
Turkey.
A clearly defined class of words that lives outside of this rule set are place names (names of
cities, towns, provinces, etc.). As seen in ‘Istanbul’ and ‘Bursa’, two large cities in Turkey, the
stress is placed on the first syllable. This is consistent for at least all Turkish place names, though
I am unsure if foreign place names, such as ‘America’, follow the same rules.
Turkish stress is heard as a rise in pitch on the accented syllable. When stress is non-final, the
stressed syllable will be followed by a falling intonation. Lastly, in a question sentence, my
language consultant used similar intonation to that of English, with rising intonation at the end of
the sentence.
Morphology
The next step after understanding Turkish phonological units is understanding its units of
meaning. Turkish words are formed by the process of agglutination, in which morphemes with
distinct syntactic classifications are added to existing root words. To test this hypothesis, I
gathered data by asking for the translation of an English root word, followed by various related
words. This data will be used to make multiple claims about the language below.
Derivational morphemes are those with distinct syntactic functions that create a new word when
added to the end of a root word. They can often change the grammatical category of the word as
well. However, the meaning of the new word is closely related to that of the root word. This
process can also be seen in English. However, Turkish diverges from English agglutination in
that it seems possible to add prepositions to the end of a noun; for this reason, they are called
postpositions. Table three displays examples of derivational agglutination. The first three rows
show agglutination that is very similar to English, while the last three demonstrate how a phrase
of multiple English words can be expressed with one Turkish word.
Table 4: Examples of Derivational Agglutination
English word(s)
Turkish translation
Morpheme breakdown
Part of speech
lock
kilit
kilit
noun
To lock up
kilitlemek
kilit-lemek
verb
locked
kilitlendi
kilit-lendi
adjective
on the desk
masada
masa-da
Postpositional phrase
from the house
evden
ev-den
Postpositional phrase
To the room
odaya
oda-ya
Postpositional phrase
Another use for agglutination is to signify the subject of a sentence by adding on inflectional
morphemes. Inflectional morphemes are those that modify a word without changing its meaning
or changing the part of speech it belongs to. Instead, they simply add information to the word.
An example is pronoun suffixes, which are added to verbs to signify the subject of the verb and
added to the end of a noun to signify a state of being (like ‘I am a doctor’) or possession (‘my
pillow’). I asked my language consultant for translations of English sentences containing four
different words preceded by every possible subject. To ensure that only one variable of the word
was changing, I kept the verbs in their present continuous tense forms. For each word I compiled
data for every type of pronoun verb ending. Upon analyzing the translations, I concluded that
Turkish subject suffixes do not change for male/female subjects, but distinctions are made
between first person singular/plural, second person singular/plural, and third person
singular/plural. The structure of the suffixes for each subject pronoun is similar, but the vowels
will change depending on the Vowel Harmony of the word. Furthermore, the personal suffixes
appear after the tense indicator suffix.
Table 5: Personal Inflectional Suffixes
Subject
To live (verb subj.)
___ pillow (possessive)
To be a chef
To yell (verb subj.)
1st singular
yaşıyorum
yastığım
şefim
bağırıyorum
1st plural
yaşıyoruz
yastığımız
şefimiz
bağırıyorsun
2nd singular
yaşıyorsun
yastığın
şefsin
bağırıyor
2nd plural
yaşıyorsunuz
yastığınız
şefsiniz
bağırıyoriz
3rd singular
(masculine)
yaşıyor
yastığı
şef
bağırıyor
3rd singular
(feminine)
yaşıyor
yastığı
şef
bağırıyor
3rd plural (masc)
yaşıyorları
yastığıları
şefleri
bağırıyorları
3rd plural (fem)
yaşıyorları
yastığıları
sefleri
bağırıyorları
I also examined the various tenses and how those are indicated in a Turkish verb. It appears that
tenses are expressed by adding inflectional morphemes, too. The tenses that my speaker shared
data for are present continuous (eg. eating), present simple (eg. eat), past (eg. ate), and future (eg.
will eat). In order to eliminate confounding variables, I limited my example sentences to the first
personal singular conjugation. This allowed me to more easily identify which morphemes were
changing as the tense changed. Based on the data in table five, I have formed a rough idea for
each tenses verb ending.The present continuous tense ending is ‘yor’, the present simple tense
ending is ‘_r’, the past simple tense ending is ‘d’, and the future tense ending is ‘y_c_ğ’. The
blanks are filled by vowels determined by vowel harmony. Furthermore, after each verb ending
is the subject’s respective personal inflectional suffix.
Table 5: Verb Tense Conjugations
Tense
‘I live’
‘I walk’
‘to sleep’
‘I jump’
Present cont.
yaşiyorum
yürüyorum
uyuyorum
zıplıyorum
Present simple
yaşirim
yürürüm
uyurum
zıplarım
Past simple
yaşadım
yürüdüm
uyudum
zıpladım
Future
yaşayacağım
yürüyeceğim
uyuyacağım
zıplayacağım
Lastly, there are two inflectional morphemes used to indicate plurality of a noun, ‘ler’ and ‘lar’.
Which morpheme is used is dependent on the Vowel Harmony rule set described in the previous
section. This means that in the case of the word containing back vowels, ‘lar’ will be used, and
for front vowels, ‘ler’ will be used. While I will not be including a visual for this morpheme, as it
seems to follow a simple rule without any special cases, it is a feature that is worth noting.
Syntax
After observing a variety of sentence translations from studying the morphology and phonology
of Turkish, I had noticed clear differences between the word order in Turkish sentences
compared to their English translations. In order to further investigate the specifics, I asked for
four translations of English sentences with a variety of parts of speech, such as subject, object,
and verb. These sentences in Turkish are seen below, as well as the English translation of each
individual word and the reordered English translation of the whole sentence.
(1)
Tavşan
Rabbit
bir
köpek gördü.
a
dog
saw
The rabbit saw a dog.
(2)
adam
ayakkabıda
yaşıyor
The man
the shoe in
lives
‘The man lives in the shoe.’
(3)
Biz
lezzetli
sandviçler
We delicious sandwiches
yapıyoruz.
making
‘We are making delicious sandwiches’
(4)
Tavşan
ne
Rabbit
what
gördü?
see
What did the rabbit see?
In (1), ‘rabbit’ is the subject, ‘a dog’ is the object, and ‘saw’ is the verb; as seen in the unordered
English translation ‘rabbit a dog saw’, the Turkish standard word ordering for these three classes
is subject → object → verb. One side note from (1) is that the definite article ‘the’ is not
represented in Turkish, while the indefinite article ‘a’ is represented by ‘bir’. ‘Bir’ is also used as
the Turkish word for one. This word ‘bir’, as well as other quantifiers such as ‘another’, are
known as particles in Turkish grammar.
Sentence (2) contains the subject ‘the man’, the object ‘the shoe’, the English preposition ‘in’,
and the verb ‘lives’. As discussed previously, Turkish has postpositions rather than prepositions,
in which the positional morpheme is added to the end of the noun it is referring to. Therefore, it
follows that the word order of (2) is subject → object+preposition → verb.
Sentence (3) introduces an adjective, ‘delicious’, along with the subject pronoun ‘we’, the object
‘sandwiches’, and the verb ‘making’. (3) demonstrates that Turkish adjectives function very
similarly to those of English. The ordering ‘lezzetli sandviçler’ shows that they appear in front of
the object/noun they are describing, just like in the English translation ‘delicious sandwiches’.
Demonstrations of earlier mentioned observations include the fact that the verb ‘are’ is assumed
and not represented, and the personal inflectional suffix ‘uz’ is used to signify that the subject is
first person plural. In fact, the free standing pronoun NP ‘biz’ could be omitted altogether—and
often is—due to the existence of ‘uz’, giving Turkish the label of a null-subject language.
Wh-movement
Lastly, sentence (4) deals with a question and the possibility of wh-movement. The syntax tree
for (4), first in Turkish and then English, can be seen below.
The English question sentence clearly undergoes wh-movement, with the verb-object ‘what’
being moved to the beginning of the sentence and the tense node ‘did’ being moved directly
‘what’. However, as seen in the Turkish Tree, there is no wh-movement of the verb-object ‘ne’,
and the sentence still follows the same word ordering (subject→object→verb) as a non-question
sentence, eg. (1). This establishes Turkish as a non-wh-movement language.
Expressing Emphasis With Word Order
English has a feature where emphasizing a particular word in a sentence can cause a change in
meaning. For example, ‘She didn’t take his money’ differs from ‘She didn’t take his money’.
Turkish also has a method for emphasizing different parts of the sentence to change meaning,
though it is done through the ordering of the words rather than their pronunciation. So far, we
have seen standard Turkish word ordering, without any emphasis. Looking at a sentence with a
subject, object, and verb, the ordering has been S-O-V. After being made aware of this method
for emphasis by my language consultant, I subsequently asked them to express the sentence
‘Melody paints houses’ using different orderings. The results and the words that would be
emphasized in English are below.
Table 6: Effects of Word Ordering on Emphasis
Ordering
Turkish sentence
Emphasized word
SOV
Melody evler boyar
None
OSV
Evler Melody boyar
Melody
SVO
Melody boyar evler
Boyar (paints)
VSO
Boyar Melody evler
Evler (houses)
Conclusion
In the course of my time spent with my language consultant, I have confirmed a number of
hypotheses and identified various rules that dictate the Turkish language. Turkish word
formation follows the rulesets of Vowel Harmony and apparent voiced/voiceless agreement for
consecutive consonants on the phonemic level, while construction is done by adding derivational
and inflectional morphemes to root words through agglutination. Stress comes on the last
syllable of a word, except for in place names and exceptional cases. Turkish follows SOV word
ordering, but lacks the phenomenon of wh-movement; however, word order can change to
express emphasis on a word and change the interpretation of a sentence.
Cause for Further Research
Still, I have a number of questions that could likely be answered with more research and time
spent focused on the subject. The first, as mentioned prior, is what causes word stress to fall on a
non-final syllable in a word that isn’t a place name. There are also a number of parts of speech
that I have yet to investigate in terms of word order, such as adverbs, particles, and conjunctions.
The biggest question I have, however, is regarding the use of vowel harmony with verb tense
suffixes like ‘yor’. This suffix seems to be immutable regardless of what vowels precede it in the
word given. Further research could be done to identify what other verb endings this applies to,
and if this occurs with other types of suffixes.
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