A Corpus Based Analysis of the Temporal Converb Clauses in Turkish

Authors : Doğan Baydal, Emine Yarar

Pages : 349-365

Doi:10.32600/huefd.1335471

View : 111 | Download : 93

Publication Date : 2024-12-30

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The studies in cognitive and psycholinguistics have reported that the sentential position of converb clauses which are part of adverbial clauses is influenced by syntactic, semantic and discourse factors (Diessel, 2005, 2008; Verstraete, 2004; Wiechmann & Kerz, 2013). One of the semantic factors is the iconicity of sequence and the related iconicity principle states that linguistic structures mostly mirror the structure of conceptual order (Croft, 2003). In other words, the meaning relationships that the linguistic structures bear has an effect on the positioning of those structures. For example, the temporal meaning relationship that a construction has can have an effect on the linear structure of this construction. This study aims at investigating the positioning variations of temporal converb clauses in Turkish and at revealing whether or not it is consistent with the iconicity principle. There are several endings used as temporal converb clauses in Turkish. In the study, the following nine converb endings are analysed: -(y)IncA (when), -DığIndA (when), -DIğI zaman (when), -ken (while), -(A/I) r…-mAz (as soon as), -DIğIndAn beri (since), -mAdAn önce (before), -DIktAn sonra (after), and –DikçA (whenever). The data of the study were collected from the Turkish National Corpus (TNC) (Aksan et al., 2012) which contains 50 million words. After identifying 9000 samples of temporal converbs, these were first grouped based on the endings mentioned above. Then the data were analysed using chi-square test. The 2×3 X² analysis was employed to see the correlations between conceptual order and linear structure. The findings of the study show that temporal converb clauses in Turkish generally have a tendency to appear before the main clause. The clauses expressing priority, namely -(y)IncA (when), -DiğIndA (when), -DIğI zaman (when), -(A/I) r…-mAz (as soon as), -DIğIndAn beri (since) and -DIktAn sonra (after) and the clauses expressing simultaneity, namely, -DiğIndA (when), -DIğI zaman (when), -ken (while) and –DıkçA (whenever) are found to precede the main clauses, which is in line with iconic clause order. The converb constructions expressing posteriority, such as –DiğIndA (when), -DIğI zaman (when) and -mAdAn önce (before) appear to precede the main clause, which is not supported by the iconicity principle. These findings suggest that the iconicity of sequence has a role in the placement of temporal converb clauses in Turkish.
Keywords : Zamansıl ulaç tümceleri, sıralamanın ikonikliği hipotezi, Türkçe, sözdizim, anlambilim