A GRAMMAR OF OLD TURKIC MARCEL ERDAL LEIDEN BRILL 2004

MORPHOLOGY 249
In Uygur the auxiliaries alk-, bar-, bol-, är-, ïd-, kal-, käl-, tur-, tut-,
tükät- and yorï- express actionality. This may not be a complete list, as
it is often difficult to ascertain whether a verb is fully lexical or an
auxiliary; the distinction between these two can be fuzzy to some
degree. Take yavašïm birlä yakïšïpan adrïlmalïm ... közi karam birlä ...
külüšügin 441 oloralïm (M II 8,20). This could mean ‘Let’s draw close,
me and my gentle one, and never separate; may my black-eyed one and
me sit and laugh in company’, taking olor - to be lexical; or, if olor- is
understood as an actionality auxiliary, it could mean ‘may we keep
laughing together’. The translation of T.Tekin 1968: 290 for türk bilgä
xagan türk sir bodunug, oguz bodunug igidü olorur (Tuñ 62) takes
olor- to signify ‘to rule’ (as it clearly sometimes does): “Turkish Bilgä
Kagan is (now) ruling, taking care of the Turkish Sir people and the
Oguz people”. Anderson 2002 (following Kondrat’ev 1981: 117), on
the other hand, takes the verb olur- (as he writes it) of this passage to be
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Tarduš bodunug eti ayu olortï, by Tekin rendered as “... reigned
ruling and governing the Tarduš people”. Both interpretations a re
perfectly possible but we follow Tekin if no unambiguous Old Turkic
examples for an auxiliary olor- are brought into the discussion.
Verbs which by lexical meaning denote a stage in the development of
an event, e.g. bašla- in nomlagalï bašla- (HTs III 815) ‘to start to
preach’, should not be called auxiliaries: They do not create members in
a grammatical category. See section 4.23 for such constructions. The
Middle Qis as Turkic u -¥£ ’l -U bašla- to denote the beginning
of an action.
The most common construction for expressing actionality is for the
auxiliary to govern a converb form of the lexical verb. The most
common converb is here the vowel converb; all auxiliaries which can
govern -gAlI forms are found to govern also -(X)p forms and vowel
converbs, and most auxiliaries governing -(X)p forms are found to
govern vowel converbs as well. When a particular auxiliary was used in
different construction the meaning did not always change, but tur- ‘to
get up; to stand’ has two quite distinct actional meanings: The meaning
of -gAlI tur-, which describes what is about to take place, emanates
from ‘getting up’; on the other hand the meanings of tur- with the
vowel converb, with the -(X)p form and with the -mIš and aorist
441 The facs. shows that a reading külüšüpän as converb cannot be excluded; there is
no other instances of külüš-üg or külüš-ük and such a derivate from an -(X)š- verb
would be very much of a rarity.