Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Note, however, that sentences where the pronoun of a conjoined subject is deleted may be
ambiguous. Since the predicate of such a sentence has plural marking (in the case of the
1st and 2nd persons and in the case of the 3rd person, when it has plural marking) it may
be unclear whether the ‘hidden’ pronoun is singular or plural:
(86) Ahmet’le dün deniz kenarında yürüyüş yaptık.
(a) ‘Yesterday Ahmet and I went for a walk on the seashore.’
(b) Yesterday we and Ahmet went for a walk on the seashore.’
Note also that -(y)lA/ile functions as a conjunction only when it is between the two items
it conjoins. Otherwise it functions as a postposition:
(87) Ben Ahmet’le dün deniz kenarınd a yürüyüş yaptım.
‘Yesterday I went with Ahmet for a walk on the seashore.’
In such a case the constituent bearing -(y)lA/ile is not part of the subject, but forms with
the comitative marker an adverbial of manner (16.4.3 (iv)); hence the predicate in (87)
has 1st person singular marking because of its agreement with ben ‘I’. For the postpositi
onal fun ct ion of -(y)lA/ile see (v) and 13.2.3.2. For the inclusive nature of -(y)lA/ile, see
28.3.1.1 (ii).
12.2.3 PERSONAL PRONOUNS AS SUBJECT COMPLEMENTS
When the subject complement of a linking sentence is a personal pronoun, the person
marker agrees with this pronoun rather than with the subject:
(88) Ayşe ben-im.
Ayşe I-1SG
‘I am Ayşe.’
Note that (88) is a sentence where the subject complement and the subject of a regular
linking sentence such as (89) are swapped:
(89) Ben Ayşe-yim.
I Ayşe-1SG
‘I am Ayşe.’
Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 122
This kind of reversal can occur only where the subject complement (Ayşe in (89)) is a
non-case-marked noun phrase.
There is an important difference in the meaning of these sentences (rendered by the
position of sentence stress in English) in that (88) corresponds to ‘I am Ayşe’ (i.e. a
response to the question Who is Ayşe?) whereas (89) corresponds to ‘I am Ayşe’ (i.e. a
response to the question Who are you?}.
12.3 COMPLEX SENTENCES AND SUBORDINATION