This report gives an account of an international workshop organized at the University of Mainz in March 2016 on the occasion of the incorporation of the Department of Oriental Studies (Seminar fair Orientkunde) into the newly established Department of Slavistics, Turcology and Circum-Baltic Studies. The workshop also commemorated the 80th birthday of Lars Johanson, professor of Turcology at the University of Mainz. All of the more than fifty participants had some relation to the Turcology in Mainz, as former doctoral students, research fellows, or project participants.
The paper deals with comparative constructions in Karaim as compared to Kazakh as spoken in China. It is demonstrated that through contact-induced changes highly endangered languages may become more complex than their more vigorous large cognates.
The first part of this paper presents ongoing work on Turkic parallel corpora at the De- partment of Linguistics and Philology, Uppsala University. Moreover, examples are given of how the Swedish-Turkish-English corpus is used in teaching Turkish and in compara- tive linguistic studies. The second part deals with the annotation scheme Universal De- pendencies (UD) used in treebanks, and its application to Turkic languages.
The article deals with the genealogical, typological, and lexicostatistical distances between Gagauz and Karaim. The aim is to present linguistic data relevant for measuring linguistic distances. The article thus complements the theoretical approach outlined by Lars Johanson (2018) and published in this issue of Turkic Languages.
This paper investigates morphosyntactic, semantic and functional qualities of the complex verbal forms -mIslIK and -mAzlIK in modern literary Turkish. It discusses their potential to serve as subordinators and explores the transitional zone between abstract nominalisation and "clausiness", by using corpus-linguistic methodology. The results show that while these rarely used forms do have the capacity to expand into clause-like structures, they also reveal some categorially contradictory patterns. Morphosyntactically, the study attempts to rank the findings on a scale. It also looks at patterns of combinability of clausal with nominal categories. Semantically, the data reveal a tendency for these constructions to be employed in the expression of (passive) negative states and to occur with matrix predicates that express emotional experience, nonverbal communication or actions and existing states, rather than explicit verbal or cognitive processing or evaluation.
A wide range of notions are grammaticalized as moods in Turkic languages. This paper deals with Turkic moods expressing volition. Turkic languages possess different grammatical moods to express volition, primarily the imperative, voluntative, optative and hypothetic (conditional) moods, indicating volitive, directive and commissive notions. The markers of these categories and their usages in different Turkic languages are briefly discussed in a comparative perspective. Moreover, modal facets of the aorist and particles accompanying volitional moods are presented.
The paper discusses the roles of Turkic sonorant consonants in contact with certain obstruents, arguing against an alleged sound law according to which Old Turkic obstruents became voiceless after stem-final n, l, r, as a result of dissimilation. It is assumed that original dental, velar and affricate stops had become weak fricatives in intervocalic position. With the loss of Proto-Turkic short final stem-vowels, the fricatives came into direct contact with the sonorants and assimilated to them, turning into weak stops. The weak cluster nǰ emerged in the same way as nd, ld, rg, etc.
The paper deals with the use of consonantal cluster conjuncts in the Turkic runiform script system optimally adapted to the East Old Turkic sound structure. The author argues that this system follows essentially syllabic principles distinguishing between front and back syllables. When two consonants meet, conjunct letters may be used, indicating that no inherent vowel is to be pronounced before the second consonant. Special signs were added for combinations such as ld and nd. These have developed into characters in their own right.
In the present paper I investigate subordination of existence and possessive clauses in contemporary Oghuz (Southwest) and Kipchak (Northwest) Turkic languages from comparative and typological points of view. One of the typological features of Turkic languages is that existence and possessive clauses are based on the same predicates. The characteristics and crosslinguistic distribution of two predicate types used in complementation and relativization of these clauses will be analyzed; these are the nonverbal predicate {BAR} and the verbal predicate {BoL}. The following results have been found. Kipchak Turkic languages, as well as Turkmen, an East Oghuz language spoken in Central Asia, use both {BAR} and {BoL} (in their bare forms or in various extended forms). The respective clauses in these languages are accordingly characterized by a formal diversity which to a certain extent ensures that distinct semantic notions are encoded by distinct formal devices. While {BAR} is also attested in some Turkish dialects, Standard Turkish (West Oghuz) makes exclusive use of {Bm}, a verb that allows ambiguities by being able to appear in quite a number of meanings and functions. In Turkic varieties that, as a result of intensive contact with Iranian or Slavic languages, exhibit right-branching and finite subordinate clauses, {BAR} appears as a typical predicate. Keywords: Kipchak Turkic, Turkish dialects, Turkmen, subordination, possessive clause, existence clause
This paper investigates the marking of indirect experience in a corpus of conversations recorded in Turkish-German bilingual families. Based on children's retellings of family stories, which necessitate a grammatical distinction between personally experienced and narratively transmitted events, the paper combines a quantitative with a discourse-analytical approach. The quantitative analysis shows that the bilingual children use indirective markers considerably less than their monolingual peers. We present three case studies, analysing input, discourse establishment, speaker-hearer interaction, comprehension, and production of forms. These analyses show how, in talking about events that occurred a generation ago, the bilingual children use unmarked, neutral forms, creating situations of confusion for their adult interlocutors, with ensuing reactions. We argue that at the formal, grammatical, level, all three children seem to follow their own system, unaffected by the adults' formal ways, their hints and recastings.
Sociolinguistic methods should be more extensively applied to the analysis of historical texts, particularly narratives & representations of oral language. Understanding processes of authorial disclosure & management of information calls for process-oriented analyses of the ways that communication events & knowledge transitions are marked within narratives. Narratives appeal in part because authors arrange & coordinate information transitions within both narrated events & narrative events. The 8th century Turkic narrative commemoration of Bilga Tonuquq offers excellent material for demonstrating how these features interact in a complex historical narrative about knowledge, communication, planning & action. Processual analysis attending to individual rather than community conventions reveals complex, idiosyncratic understandings of the social uses of logic, poetics, narrative, & metaphor. The resulting clarity about how this narrator tells history improves our understanding of the narrator's intentions, improves translation, & clarifies the text's relationship to its historical context.