Demonstratives and Grammaticalization A Perspective from Modern Turkish

Demonstratives and Grammaticalization offers an in-depth analysis of the demonstrative system in Turkish.

This book provides the first comprehensive analysis dealing with both the synchronic variations in Turkish demonstratives and their grammatical changes. It sheds light on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of the demonstratives, systematically describes the various usages of these forms, and provides a unified explanation for the various accounts of their distribution. While the focus is on Turkish, this analysis contributes to our understanding of how a demonstrative system operates in a language with a three-way distinction.

Contents

Preface

List of figures

List of tables

List of abbreviations

Ill-formedness markers

1 Introduction

1.1 The concept of demonstrative

1.2 Demonstratives in Japanese, Korean, and Turkish

1.3 Previous works on Turkish demonstratives

1.4 Overview of the book

2 Some aspects of bu, şu, and o

2.1 Exophoric use

2.2 Textual deictic use

2.3 Turkish demonstratives and definiteness

2.4 Repetition, controllability,and demonstrative use

2.5 Discourse deictic use

2.6 Syntactic distribution of the endophoric bu and o

3 Grammaticalization

3.1 Theoretical background

3.2 Exophoric usage > Non-anaphoric usage

3.3 Non-anaphoric usage > Anaphoric usage

3.4 Non-anaphoric usage > Sentence connectives

3.5 Anaphoric usage > Third person pronoun

3.6 Anaphoric usage > Demonstrative correlate

3.7 Some reflections on the process of grammaticalization

4 Conclusions

4.1 Main findings

4.2 Future research

Index

Metin Balpınar is Assistant Professor in the Japanese Language and Literature Department at Mehmet Akif Ersoy University (Burdur, Turkey). He completed his MA in Japanese Language Education at Reitaku University (Chiba, Japan) and PhD in Linguistics at Okayama University (Okayama, Japan). His main research interests are Turkish and Japanese linguistics, with a special focus on demonstratives.