Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 148
the quantifiers bütün/tüm ‘all’, ‘the whole’, the meaning of the noun phrase is crucially
affected by whether the head is plural marked or not:
(22) Bütün sınıf ayağa kalktı.
‘The whole class rose to its feet.’
(23) Bu yıl bütün sınıflar daha kalabalık olacak.
‘This year all the classes are going to be larger.’
Restrictions on the use of plural marking:
(i) -lAr is not used where plurality is already indicated by the presence of a numeral as
a modifier in the noun phrase:
üç çocuk ‘three children’
yirmi beş dakika ‘twenty-five minutes’
The only exceptions to this rule are the proper names of well-known groups:
Üç Silahşörler ‘the Three Musketeers’
Yedi Cüceler ‘the Seven Dwarfs’
(ii) Where certain quantifying determiners (15.6.1), i.e. çok ‘a lot of’, ‘many’, fazla ‘too
much’, ‘too many’, az ‘not much’, ‘not many’, biraz ‘a little’, birkaç ‘a few’, ‘several’,
bir miktar ‘some’, bu kadar/şu kadar/o kadar ‘this much/that much’, ‘so much’, kaç
‘how many’, and her ‘every’, are used in a noun phrase, the head noun is always left in
the singular form:
her Türk vatandaşı ‘every Turkish citizen’
kaç kişi ‘how many people’
birkaç boş oda ‘a few empty rooms’
çok kitap ‘a lot of books’
The determiner birçok ‘many’ sometimes occurs with a plural-marked head noun,
although the non-marked form is generally preferred, and is obligatory in the case of kişi
‘person’:
birçok kadın(lar) ‘many women’
birçok kişi ‘many people’
(iii) The combination of bir and -lAr:
The head of a noun phrase which includes the indefinite determiner bir ‘a(n)’ (15.6.1)
normally has to be in the singular form. However, in the case of the pluralized forms of
the pronouns bir şey ‘something’ (18.6.1) and bir yer ‘somewhere’, the sequence
bir…lAr regularly occurs in informal contexts:
(24) Harun o gün bana bir şeyler söyledi.
‘Harun told me some things that day.’
(25) Bu yaz bir yer(ler)e gidiyor musunuz?