Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The present book would not have been in the form it is had it not been for the generous
feedback of the following colleagues, friends and students, linguists and teachers and
users of Turkish, who read and commented on parts of the manuscript: Didar Akar,
Öznur Ayman, Ercan Balcı, Cem Çakır, Georgia Catsimali, Monik Charette, Ruth
Christie, Ann Denwood, Dilek Elçin, Eser Erguvanlı-Taylan, Kate Fleet, Jorge
Hankamer, Katerina Hardiman, Atakan İnce, Meltem Kelepir, Elisabeth Kendall,
Wilfried Meyer-Viol, Mine Nakipoğlu-Demiralp and A.Sumru Özsoy. We are grateful to
all these people for sparing the time to help us in this way.
We owe special thanks to Ceyda Arslan for reading the whole manuscript
meticulously. Her detailed and insightful corrections helped us avoid many errors.
Dimitris Antoniou and Andras Riedlmayer provided valuable help in pointing us to
some of the statistics about Turkish speakers outside Turkey, and Mehmet Ölmez,
Şükriye Ruhi and Güneş Müftüoğlu kindly responded to our questions about reference
grammars in current use for teaching purposes in Turkey. We are indebted to Meltem
Kelepir, Zeynep Kulelioğlu, Mine Nakipoğlu-Demiralp, Gülen Ergin and Müfide Pekin
for their readiness to give us their acceptability judgements on problematic constructions,
and to Onat Işık for his technical help in transferring several files from one computer
system to another. We are also grateful to our students at Boğaziçi and Oxford
Universities, who (whether they were aware of it or not) constantly brought to our
attention aspects of Turkish that we might not otherwise have thought about.
Gratitude is due to our successive editors at Routledge, Simon Bell, Sophie Oliver,
Sarah Butler, Liz O’Donnell and Ruth Jeavons for their feedback and patience throughout
the years, and to several anonymous reviewers for their comments.
During the preparation of this book we have drawn heavily on the work of others,
some of it unpublished. Unfortunately the format of this book does not allow us to
acknowledge our sources at the appropriate points in the text. We hope that this will not
give the impression that all the observations and descriptions presented in the book
belong originally to us, and that we will be forgiven for having to content ourselves with
simply including our sources in the bibliography. Needless to say, responsibility for any
shortcomings that this book may have rests entirely with ourselves.
Finally, we should like to thank our closest friends and our families for their unfailing
support in what has been a prolonged and often too absorbing task.
Aslı Göksel
Celia Kerslake
July 2004