STRUCTURE OF THE TRANSITIVE PERIOD AS AN EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION OF BASIC WORD ORDER IN THE ORKHUN TURKIC: PRONOMIAL POST-PREDICATE
ORHON TÜRKÇESİNDE TÜRKÇENİN TEMEL SÖZ SIRASININ EVRİMİNE KANIT BİR GEÇİŞ DÖNEMİ YAPISI: ADILSIL DEVRİKLİK

Author : Turgay SEBZECİOĞLU -- Sibel EKDİ
Number of pages : 343-360

Abstract

On the syntactic platform, inverted sentence is described as sentences structured by adding words after verb or sentenced made up of phrases. Although there is common and inured belief about the contemporary Turkish language that unmarked basic say has the order in Subject-Object-Verb, it is possible consider that this view has been formed more about scripting; and thus, it is rather disputable issue. Hence, it was seen in the study of Sebzecioğlu and Ekdi (2015) about inverted sentence in Turkish that sensual reactions of language users in both verbal and scriptural language were measured and it was observed on the contrary to the presumed that usage of verb-sequel (invert) structures display dominance in considerable amount. The present study was structured on the basis of opinion that aforesaid observation would become more evident and provable with diachronic views of Turkish language. In other words, the present study departed to search for clues which support the view that word order in the ancient periods of Turkish language would not be Subject-Object-Verb or that it could have been evolved into such a word order. The texts compromising corpus of this study belong to Orkhun Turkic period. The reason for preferring this ancient period was that it was the preliminary periods of Turkish language which could be traced by texts and accordingly that it was convenient to access to the earliest forms of word order. As one of the characteristics of the Orkhun Turkic, the fact that personal pronouns were not completely added onto verbs yet (e.g. kel-teçi men) suggests that an independent word status was maintained substantively even though it was not functionally. As characterized with this study, structures which could be considered within this sort of verb-sequel array were referred as pronominal post-predicate. In the pronominal inverted sentences of the Orkhun Turkic, personal pronouns were not introduced into grammaticalisation process while indicating persons and numbers in the verb inflection yet. This situation casts doubt on basic word order claiming that Turkish language has been in order of Subject-Object-Verb. Such that, Orkhun Turkic period could reflect a transition period in which oldish Object-Verb-Subject array started to disappear and Subject-Object-Verb array was strengthening its position in Turkish language. Since there is no any text from the first Turkic or mother Turkic periods, we currently lack of information on oldish Object-Verb-S

Keywords

Turkish, Orkhun Turkic, Word Order, Inverted Sentence, Pronominal Post-Predicate

Read: 714

Download: 235