Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

(7) büyük bir oda
‘a large room’
(8) [Mustafa’nın çalışma odası olarak kullandığı] oda
‘the room that Mustafa uses as a study’
All modifiers in the Turkish noun phrase, however complex, precede the head. The head
is the location for any inflectional suffixes that pertain to the noun phrase as a whole:
(9) {Bu kattakien güzel oda-lar-ımız}-ı size ayırdık.
room-PL-1PL.POSS-ACC
‘We’ve given you {our best rooms on this floor}.’
14.1.1 ITEMS WHICH CAN FUNCTION AS THE HEAD OF A NOUN
PHRASE
There are three word classes that can function as the head of a noun phrase: nouns, noun
compounds, and pronouns. Some examples of each are given below:
(i) Nouns:
(a) common nouns
adam ‘man’, para ‘money’, tarih ‘history’
(b) proper nouns
Mustafa, İstanbul, Avrupa
(ii) Noun compounds (Chapter 10):
(a) bare compounds
kız öğrenci ‘female student’, taş duvar ‘stone wall’
(b) -(s)I compounds
otobüs bileti ‘bus ticket’, Türk kahvesi ‘Turkish coffee’
(iii) Pronouns (Chapter 18):
sen ‘you’, bu ‘this’, orası ‘that (place)’, hangisi ‘which (one)’, öteki ‘the other’
Of these three classes, pronouns differ from the other two in that they very rarely
occur with any modifiers.
14.1.2 MODIFIERS IN THE NOUN PHRASE
Modifiers that may be present in a noun phrase fall into two classes: determiners and
adjectivals.
Determiners (15.6) constitute a small class of items whose function is to specify the
limitation (or lack of limitation) of the potential referent of a noun phrase, such as bu
‘this’, aynı ‘the same’, her ‘every’, etc.
Adjectivals (15.1–5) attribute some kind of quality to the head of a noun phrase.
Turkish adjectivals range from simple adjectives, such as iyi ‘good’, yeni ‘new’, zengin
‘rich’, yüksek ‘high’, through various kinds of more complex forms and phrases to
relative clauses (Chapter 25), which have a sentence-like internal structure.
(10) küçük bir kız
The noun phrase 145