Generic markers in Turkish


TURGAY T.

Turkic Languages, cilt.27, sa.1, ss.65-89, 2023 (AHCI, Scopus)

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 27 Sayı: 1
  • Basım Tarihi: 2023
  • Doi Numarası: 10.13173/tl.27.1.065
  • Dergi Adı: Turkic Languages
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus, IBZ Online, Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.65-89
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: aorist, characterizing, classifying, genericity, habitual, kind, Turkish
  • Kırklareli Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

This study addresses generic expressions in Turkish, the nominal and verbal morphosyn-tactic markers involved in their derivations, and the interpretation they give rise to. It is demonstrated that the aorist suffix {-(V)r} is the only true verbal marker of characterizing genericity in that it always introduces GEN into the structure. The nominal predicate marker {-DIr} is shown to be compatible with a characterizing reading if an individual-level predicate is present, but never encodes a generic reading on its own because it is not a GEN-introducer. The analysis is demonstrated to account for a number of facts about Turkish generics built on verbal as well as nominal predicates. Overall, in contrast to the argument that all generic expressions are bipartite structures involving reference to kinds, the analysis proposed in this study supports the proposal that statements of characterizing genericity are tripartite structures involving a generic operator.