turkish phonology and morphology (türkçe ses ve b‹ç‹mb‹lg‹s‹)

136
Turkish Phonology and Morphology (Türkçe Ses ve Biçim Bilgisi)
with teeth. But it was difficult. Recall that it was not admitted first because it had
wings. Apparently, having wings does not satisfy class membership for animals
with teeth. Birds did not want him either because he had teeth. Apparently, being
a bird blocks having teeth. It is difficult to draw borderlines between classes, isn’t
it? Do we have the same problem in linguistic classification? We know that adverbs
modify adjectives. Çok, as an adverb, modifies iyi in çok iyi insan. Çabucak is an
adverb as well, but why is *çabucak iyi insan ungrammatical?
CLASSIFYING WORDS
An important aspect of morphology is the classification of words into word classes,
also known as lexical categories, or parts of speech. Among several attempts to
classify parts of speech in Turkish, we will adopt the one illustrated in (1). Each
bracketed word is specified as an example of the word class listed on the right.
(1)
a. Suzan okulu [bit]irdi ve ö¤retmen [ol]du. VERB
b. [U¤ur] [araba]y› park etti. NOUN
c. [Yeni] ö¤retmen çok [iyi]. ADJECTIVE
d. [Genellikle] [çok] hareketlidirler. ADVERB
e. Annem [için] bu ifl buraya [kadar]. POSTPOSITION
f. Geldi [ve] hemen yatt›. CONJUNCTION
g. [Ben]i görmedi. PRONOUN
h. [Hiflflt] bebek uyuyor! INTERJECTION
But what is a word class? A word class is made up of words sharing the common
properties which characterize that class. However, as widely acknowledged in the
literature (Aksan, 2000: 95; Banguo¤lu, 1995: 153; Csato and Johanson, 1998: 208,
Deny, 1941: 193-198; Dilaçar, 1971: 98; Ergin, 1998: 217; Korkmaz, 2003:249,
Kornfilt, 1997: 93), membership is not restricted to a single class and that many
words may belong to more than one. For example, büyük is an adjective in büyük
adam, a noun in büyükler gelmedi, and an adverb in büyük konufltu. Similarly, to
take a commonly cited example, ara can occur as any one of the four different
parts of speech: a noun in onunla aram›z iyi de¤il, an adjective in ara sokak, a
postposition in direkler aras›, and an adverb in su ara ara ak›yor (Dilaçar, 1971:
98). From these examples, it appears that there may not always be clear-cut
boundaries between word classes. It seems that words form a network with
intersecting categories. So how can we describe an intricate network in a step by
step fashion? Should we give up on classifying words altogether? What measures
can be taken to ease this task?
It is necessary to understand that we cannot classify a given word by considering
it in isolation. We also need to understand how it is used in a particular instance.
It is also important to make a distiction between prototypical and nonprototypical
members of a word class. For a given category, we may find two
groups of examples: one sharing a number of central grammatical properties, and
the other exhibiting some but not all of these properties. The core members having
the full set of properties will be regarded as the prototypical examples. For example,
gibi is a noun in senin gibiler, but how noun a noun is it? It certainly has the
property of carrying the plural marker, which is typical of the category noun.
However, the fact that it cannot preserve its nouniness in phrases like çal›flkan gibi
and gördü¤ün gibi makes it non-prototypical. In these examples it loses its nominal