On the true nature of ÇOKTAN in Turkish

Emrah Görgülü

doi:10.18492/dad.1529687

EN TR

On the true nature of ÇOKTAN in Turkish

Abstract

Turkish has the temporal adverb çoktan ‘long time ago’ that has been treated as a positive polarity item (PPI) in recent studies. It has been argued that it cannot co-occur with clause-mate negation, whereas native speakers seem to have split it into two in terms of its grammaticality with long-distance negation. Interestingly, there seems to be almost no formal study that has ever analyzed the properties of Turkish PPIs. In this paper, the objective was to carry out a corpus analysis of çoktan and find out whether it is truly an item of positive polarity. Based on new corpus data, it is shown that çoktan is indeed an element of positive polarity that predominantly occurs in positive sentences. It is also argued that its overall behavior can be captured by way of the semantic notion of (non)-veridicality since its syntactic distribution includes veridical and certain non-veridical contexts but excludes antiveridical ones.

Keywords

Türkçede ÇOKTAN sözcüğünün gerçek doğası üzerine

Öz

Türkçede zaman belirteci olarak kullanılan çoktan sözcüğü son yıllarda yapılan çalışmalarda Olumlu Uçluk Öğesi olarak değerlendirilmiştir. Bu sözcüğün aynı tümcede olumsuzlamayla bir arada olamayacağı ortaya koyulurken, uzak mesafeli olumsuzlama bakımından ise anadili konuşucularının dilbilgisi açısından ikiye ayrıldığı belirtilmiştir. Türkçede Olumlu Uçluk Öğelerinin özelliklerini sistemli olarak inceleyen hemen hemen hiçbir çalışma bulunmamaktadır. Bu çalışmadaki temel amaç, bu sözcüğün gerçekten bir Olumlu Uçluk Öğesi olup olmadığını ortaya koymak için bir bütünce analizi gerçekleştirmektir. Bu çalışma için toplanan bütünce verilerine dayanarak, çoktan sözcüğün gerçekten de ağırlıklı olarak olumlu yapılarda bulunan bir Olumlu Uçluk Öğesi olduğu sonucuna varılmıştır. Aynı zamanda, bu sözcüğün sözdizimsel dağılımının, doğrulamalı ve doğrulama-harici ortamları içerdiği fakat doğrulama-karşıtı bağlamları dahil etmemesi nedeniyle anlambilimsel bir nosyon olan doğrula(ma)ma kavramı aracılığıyla açıklanabileceği savunulmaktadır.

Anahtar Kelimeler

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