On the Typology of Copied Verbs in Modern Turkic Languages

İbrahim Ahmet Aydemir (Hacettepe University)

The purpose of this presentation is to present the typology of the copied verbs in Modern Turkic languages. As a result of the fact that the Turks have been in contact with different communities and cultures throughout history, many lexical elements have been copied from other languages to Turkic languages. There are many verbs among the copied elements. When we look at Turkic languages in general, the following four strategies are observed (Wohlgemuth 2009):

a) Light verb strategy: The use of a foreign verbal component (infinitive, verbal noun, participle) with the Turkic auxiliary verb: (Ttü. park yap– < Eng. ‘to park’, Özb. perevesti qilmoq ‘to translate’< Rus. perevesti ‘to translate’) b) Direct insertion: Taking directly a verbal root from a language into grammar of Turkic languages. (Tuv. çada- ’not to be able to do‘< Mo. yada-‚ ‘be incapable of‘). c) Indirect insertion: Taking a foreign verb form and adding a Turkic verbal suffix to that borrowed item. (Ttü. ispat-la-, ‘prove‘ < Ar. isbat‚ ‘proving’) d) Paradigm insertion: In this process, the verb is copied along with the suffixes of original language (For example, using a German conjugated verb in Turkish spoken in Germany). This strategy is similar to the linguistic phenomenon known as “code-switching”. These four strategies will be examined in terms of general typological characteristics and proportional/regional distributions. Then semantic borrowing will be discussed. In this type of copying, the content of a foreign verb is only taken semantically. For example: Ttü. indir– <Eng. ‘to download ‘. This method corresponds to the selected copying in the Johanson copying model. The typological classification and evaluations in this article will be based on the “borrowing/copying models” expressed in Wohlgemuth 2009 and Johanson 1992.