Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

kim can have plural marking when the speaker knows or assumes that more than one
person or type of person is involved:
(44) En çok kim-ler-in çocuk-lar-ı okulda başarılı oluyormuş?
who-PL-GEN child-PL-3SG.POSS
‘Whose children (the children of what type of people) are the most successful at
school?’
When kim combines with the comitative/instrumental marker -(y)lA/ile, the result is
kiminle ‘with whom’ (8.1.4). However, kimle is also used in informal speech:
(45) En çok kim-(in)-le şakalaşmayı seviyorsun?
who-(GEN)-COM
‘Who do you most like to fool around with?’
19.2.1.2 ne ‘what’
ne is used in questions where the target is an inanimate object, a substance, or an abstract
concept. It can combine with all the inflectional suffixes that attach to nouns (8.1, 14.3),
and it occurs in the positions occupied by noun phrases (Chapter 14):
(46) Bu kutunun içinde ne-ler var?
what-PL
‘What’s in this box?’
(47) Serap Almanya’ya ne-yle gidiyor?
what-INS
‘How (=by what means) is Serap going to Germany?’
ne is also used when the modifier in a nominal compound is the target of a question:
(48) O adam ne doktor-u?
that man what doctor-NC
‘What is the specialization of that doctor?’ (lit. ‘What sort of doctor is that man?’)
When used as a direct object, the non-case-marked ne indicates that the speaker has no
preconceptions about the answer, whereas the accusativecase-marked neyi implies that
the speaker expects the answer to fall within a specified set of items, usually concrete
objects:
(49) Ne istiyorsun?
‘What do you want?’
(50) Neyi istiyorsun?
‘What do you want?’
Turkish: A comprehensive grammar 260
The first question is a general inquiry about what the addressee wants, or expects to
happen. The second question, on the other hand, would be asked in a situation where the
speaker has a number of items in mind and expects the answer to refer to one of those
items.