Sema Aslan Demir (Hacettepe University)
Turkmen belongs to the Oghuz branch of Turkic languages and is mostly spoken in Turkmenistan. It also has speakers in Iran, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and some parts of the north Caucasus. Although it is an Oghuz language, it also shares some common areal features with the Northwestern (Kipchak) branch and the Southeastern (Chagatay) branch of the Turkic languages. In this work, I’ll discuss Turkmen from the view of semantic typology. Semantic typology is that part of linguistic typology concerned with the expression of meaning in language and languages. It is thus the systematic cross-linguistic study of how languages express meaning by way of signs (Evans 2010). In this work, I’ll try to analyze the Turkmen language with regard to the lexicon, and I’ll discuss the typological situation of Turkmen with regard to semantics, among the Oghuzic languages.