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This volume is a comprehensive grammar of the Turkish language, suitable both for students of the Turkish language and linguistic scholars. Gerjan van Schaaik draws on sound linguistic research and an extensive corpus of real-life data, alongside more than twenty years of feedback from university classrooms, to provide the most complete, up-to-date, and practically useful survey of the Turkish language ever compiled. Following an introduction that provides background information on the Turkic languages and an overview of the linguistic terminology adopted in the volume, the first part of the book explores the fundamentals of Turkish spelling and pronunciation. Parts II and III explore the noun phrase and adjuncts and modifiers, respectively, while Parts IV and V examine the verbal system and sentence structure. These first five parts together represent a valuable overview of the fundamentals of Turkish grammar. Part VI provides an account of the ways in which new words are constructed on the basis of existing material, and constitutes a bridge to the more advanced matter treated in parts VII and VIII, including relative clauses, subordination, embedded clauses, clausal complements and the finer points of the verbal system. The work will be accompanied by a companion website that will provide exercises to accompany each part.
List of contents
- 1: Introduction
- Part I: Spelling and Pronunciation
- 2: The alphabet
- 3: On stress
- 4: Phonological variation
- 5: Morphological variation
- Part II: The Noun Phrase
- 6: Nouns
- 7: Pronouns
- 8: Adjectives
- 9: Functions of the noun phrase
- Part III: Adjuncts and Modifiers
- 10: Spatial orientations
- 11: Counting and quantities
- 12: Times and dates
- 13: Postpositions
- 14: Adverbs and their like
- Part IV: Verbs
- 15: Infinitival forms
- 16: Imperative forms
- 17: Negation
- 18: Indirect imperative forms
- 19: Optative forms
- 20: Present, past, and future
- 21: Abilitative forms
- 22: Necessity and hypothesis
- Part V: Sentence Structure
- 23: Simple sentences
- 24: Projections
- 25: On plurality
- 26: Sundry particles
- 27: Clause linking
- 28: Postpositional complements
- 29: Ordering patterns
- Part VI: Word Formation
- 30: Formation of verbs
- 31: Formation of adjectives and nouns
- Part VII: Nominalizations
- 32: Relative clauses
- 33: Subordination and embedding
- Part VIII: Complex Sentences
- 34: Stacking embedded sentences
- 35: Sentential complements
- 36: Postposition-like constructions
- 37: Verbal complexes
- Glossary of grammatical terms
- Selected bibliography
- Indexes
About the author
Until his retirement in 2014, Gerjan van Schaaik taught Turkish grammar and linguistics at Leiden University, and prior to that at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and the Boğaziçi University (Istanbul). His research has been published in the journal Turkic Languages, in edited books published by Benjamins and Harrassowitz Verlag, as well as in several Dutch language journals and books.
Summary
This volume is a comprehensive grammar of the Turkish language, suitable both for students of the Turkish language and linguistic scholars. It explores all aspects of Turkish, from basic pronunciation to sentence structure and advanced topics such as relative and embedded clauses.
