Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 50
hepimiz ‘all of us’, şurada ‘here’, ‘over there’. There is no gender distinction in Turkish
pronouns.
(iii) Adjectives:
An adjective (15.2) ascribes some property, quality or status to the entity denoted by a
noun. Examples are sarı ‘yellow’, yumuşak ‘soft’, and dürüst ‘honest’. Adjectives in
Turkish can be modified by adverbials such as çok ‘very’, son derece ‘extremely’ and
oldukça ‘rather’, as in çok önemli ‘very important’, oldukça yumuşak ‘rather soft’
(15.4.1.1). They can be expressed in comparative or superlative forms by the addition of
the modifiers daha ‘more’ or en ‘most’, as in daha dürüst ‘more honest’, and en yumuşak
‘softest’ (15.4.2 and 15.4.3). Determiners, such as bir ‘a/an’, her ‘each’, bütün ‘all’ and
bu ‘this’, ‘these’ (15.6), and numerals, such as iki bin ‘two thousand’, üçüncü ‘(the)
third’ (15.7) are functionally related to the adjective class.
Most lexical items which occur primarily as adjectives can also occur as nouns, taking
plural, possessive and case suffixes as required, or they can function as adverbs, in
particular as circumstantial adverbs of manner (16.4.3). An example of the first type is
the word küçük ‘small’, which is primarily used as an adjective, as in küçük kızlar ‘little
girls’, but which can also be used as a noun, as in küçükler ‘(the) little ones’. An example
of the second type is the word kötü ‘bad’, as in kötü araba ‘(a) bad car’, which when
placed immediately before the verb in a sentence functions as an adverb meaning ‘badly’,
as in kötü yüzmek ‘to swim badly’.
(iv) Adverbs:
An adverb modifies, that is to say provides further specification of the meaning of, a
verb, an adjective, another adverb, or a whole sentence (Chapter 16). Adverbs that
modify verbs typically provide information about the manner, time or degree of the
occurrence of an event: yavaşça ‘slowly’, hep ‘always’, çok ‘a lot’. Adverbs that modify
adjectives or other adverbs specify the degree to which the concepts they denote apply,
such as biraz ‘somewhat’ and çok ‘very’ in biraz büyük ‘somewhat large’, çok sık ‘very
often’. Examples of adverbs that modify a whole sentence are belki ‘perhaps’ and
maalesef ‘unfortunately’. Occasionally, words that occur primarily as adverbs can be
inflected as nouns. Thus şimdi ‘now’ can appear in the form şimdilerde ‘nowadays’,
which includes number and case markers.
7.1.2 VERBS
A verb is a word which expresses an action, event, process or state, such as koş- ‘run’,
bit- ‘end’, ol- ‘be’, ‘become’, kal- ‘remain’, ‘stay’. Verbs in Turkish are inflected for
voice (8.2.1, 13.2), negation (8.2.2, 20.1), tense, aspect and modality (8.2.3, Chapter
21) and person (8.4, 12.2.1). Verb stems, derived or non-derived, are indicated in this
book by a following hyphen.
7.1.3 POSTPOSITIONS
Postpositions (Chapter 17) are words which take noun phrase complements. Examples
are karşı ‘against’ (e.g. bana karşı ‘against me’), sonra ‘after’ (e.g. toplantıdan sonra
‘after the meeting’, and için ‘for’, e.g. kimin için ‘for whom’). Lexical items that occur
primarily as postpositions (17.2) are not inflected when functioning as such. However, an