Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

(vi) The addition of -lAr can also highlight the spatial extent of the substance referred to,
whether in area or volume terms:
(34) Kum(lar)a uzandım.
‘I lay down on the sand.’
Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 150
(vii) In the case of nouns expressing abstract states, the addition of the plural suffix
usually expresses a plurality of occurrences of this state:
(35) Böyle tembelliklerim çok oluyor.
‘I’m often lazy like this.’ (‘Such acts of laziness on my part occur often.’)
(viii) -lAr can be added to certain expressions of time and place, giving a sense of
approximation, or giving the expression a wider meaning. The list below gives some
common examples. Although the locative case-marked form is shown for several items,
other case markings also occur according to context.
buralarda ‘around here’
bir yerler ‘anywhere’, ‘somewhere’
oralar (güzel) ‘(It’s nice) round there.’
Erzurum taraflarında ‘around Erzurum’, ‘in the Erzurum area’
uzaklarda ‘in the distance’
1995 ortalarında ‘about the middle of 1995’
mayıs başlarında ‘at about the beginning of May’
bu haftanın sonlarına doğru ‘towards the end of this week’
o sıralarda ‘at about that time’
o tarihlerde ‘around that date’, ‘at that period’
şimdilerde ‘these days’
sonralari ‘later on’
bir zamanlar ‘once’ (=at some time in the past)
Approximations about people’s age fit into the same pattern:
kırkbeş yaşlarında bir adam ‘a man of about fory-five’
o yaşlarda ‘at about that age’
(ix) For the use of -lArI to express recurrent time (sabahları ‘in the morning(s)’,
cumartesileri ‘on Saturdays’, etc.) see 16.4.1.1 (63).
(x)
(a) When attached to the name of a famous person, -lAr means ‘and people like
that’: