Ancestral Kuo Er Kurt Book Syntactic Form Research

This study is a morpho-syntactic description of The Book of Dede Korkut (Dresten version), a collection of epic tales passing from generation to generation in an oral form for centuries before the first written copies emerged (in the15th or16th centuries). The paper consists, among its major parts, of word classes, word groups and phrases, propositional structure, finiteness markers and sentence patterns.We take the sentence as the basic unit of our description, with much less attention paid to structures above sentences, i.e. coherence and cohesion. A sentence can be classified as simple, compound or complex according to its structural complexity. Much emphasis is placed on complex sentences, which include only those introduced by the loan word ki(m)-two criteria apply:such a sentence has its own finiteness markers, and is a component of the main clause. A subject-predicate structure headed by a verbal, nominal or adverbial adjective is not independent, though it also constitutes a part of the main clause-it is nothing but a downgraded sentence and so should be excluded from dependent clauses. Direct speech differs from the aforementioned sentence patterns in that it is independent but embedded inside a sentence as the complement of a speech verb.Declaratives and optatives are the major sentence types from a functional point of view. We argue for a two level bipartition of declarative sentences, between a proposition and a set of finiteness markers on the sentential level, and a subject and a predicate on the propositional level, as opposed to the traditional straightforward subject-predicate bipartition of sentence patterns. Finiteness is expressed by a syntagmatic sequence of polarity, indicative, mood, agreement and modality markers. For nominal sentences, polarity includes an unmarked member for positive and degul for negative meaning; for verbal sentences, this is embedded inside the verb (and therefore is not a part of the finiteness) with, again, an unmarked member for positives and-mA-for negatives.’Indicative’, though not a satisfactory term, is here used to cover both declarative and interrogative meanings, with the former implicit and the latter explicit through the clitic ml where a yes-no type interrogative is in question. Mood is used here as a cover term for the paradigm of the four inflectional forms of copular i-(<old Turkic dr-), beside which there is an unmarked form expressing present tense in opposition to idi for past tense. The rest of the copular forms (imis, ise and iken) are markers for evidential, conditional and temporal meanings respectively. Agreement markers originate either in personal pronouns or possessive suffixes. At the outer side of a finite sentence is an unmarked form and an enclitic-dUr, expressing epistemic modality.Subjects and predicates reflect the relations between sentence components. Sentences with verbal adjective (i.e. participle) phrases as their predicates are called verbal, whereas others are nominal. A verb has a subject and zero or more complements in its argument structure. Complements are not listed in this study as distinct components on the same rank of subjects and predicates, as they are viewed as part of verbal phrases. Adjuncts show much diversity both in form and in meaning and can be divided roughly into two groups:circumstantial and modal. Circumstantial adjuncts are those closely related in meaning to the proposition, modal adjuncts to the finiteness.Word groups and phrases make the immediate constituents of sentences-a well established approach within the structuralist tradition. Describing a sentence as a construction of words is rather like describing a house as a construction of bricks, without recognizing the walls and the rooms as intermediate structural units.Classification of words is necessary for the description of structures on a higher rank within the language hierarchy. Beside nouns, verbs, adjectives etc., clitics are also discussed as an item of special importance on the traditional list. A clitic is a linguistic form half-way between autonomous words and affixes. Though quite common in a wide range of genealogically unrelated languages, clitics have been neglected to a certain extent in most descriptive studies of Turkic languages.We have placed much emphasis on the discussion of tense and aspect categories. We argue that only aspect is a verbal category, while tense takes the proposition as a whole in its scope. The so called’simple tense’forms are believed to be verbal adjectives of different aspects,; in other words, they are not finite. Temporal meanings on the lexical-semantic level of verb phrases can be classified as lexical aspects (or, situation types), with such members as ACComplishments, ACHievements, ACTivities, SEMELfactives and STAtes.The underlying goal of this synchronic description is, not surprisingly, diachronic. Related forms of modern languages (especially those of Turkish) are taken into consideration with the aim of bringing to light the mechanism of change in relation to at least that part of language. This sort of observations necessarily involves judgment on the genealogical relations between the language of Dede Korkut and its modern relatives, a topic beyond the scope of this study. We believe, however, an objective, thorough and systematic description may help those interested draw their own conclusions in this respect.Underlying the presentation of the language system is a structuralist-funtionalist approach. Scattered throughout this dissertation are basic ideas and concepts of F. de Saussure, the Prague School, M.A.K. Halliday, linguistic typology and cognitive grammar-i.e. language is a hierarchical system of form-meaning combinations; a grammatical category is a set of linguistic elements of the same syntagmatic and paradigmatic distribution; a member of a category can be unmarked; many grammatical categories are prototypes; some phenomena are cross-linguistically universal and can be explained from a cognitive point of view (e.g. iconicity).Use of NLP (Natural Language Processing) techniques not only improves the efficiency of this study, but also make quantitative observations easier. In addition to qualitative presentations, such observations are necessary for any thorough descriptions, either synchronic, diachronic or both. A’stripping plus generating’algorithm realized in Python is applied for morphological tagging and a KIC search program is developed. We believe this algorithm is also applicable to other Turkic languages and thus makes a promising by-product of this thesis.