The Turkish Nominal Phrase in Spoken Discourse (review)

This book, volume 40 in the well-known Turcologica series edited by Lars Johanson, is the revised version of the author’s 1995 doctoral dissertation. Its eight well-written chapters deal with the nominal phrase in Turkish discourse. Schroeder emphasizes that he is referring to ‘unplanned’ spoken discourse, which he defines as spontaneously evolving (5). The language described is the colloquial Turkish of Istanbul and Ankara. This corpus was meticulously gathered from tape recordings, particularly of Turkish television talk shows and radio interviews—both excellent sources of accurate data, although I am puzzled as to how he can be sure that all the speakers recorded were speaking Istanbul or Ankara dialects.

After a preliminary discussion of terms and definitions, the remainder of Ch. 1 focuses on pragmatic operations such as the establishment or re-establishment of a topic (7–18). Ch. 2 is a brief sketch of Turkish grammar, clarifying for the reader some of the basic issues discussed (19–54). One may quibble with the author’s inclusion of, for example, the well-known eight-vowel system, the mention of vowel harmony, etc. (20–21), lexical classes (e.g. nouns and verbs, 22–23), or function words (23). It is interesting to note, however, that word order in Turkish is said to be ‘quite free’ even though it is often considered to be a fairly restricted SOV language (20). This point is reiterated by Jaklin Kornfilt, who notes: ‘Often (but not always), the divergences from the unmarked order have a pragmatic, discourse-oriented function, in that the position immediately preceding the verb is the focus position and the sentence-initial position is topic position’ (‘Turkish and the Turkic languages’ in Bernard Comrie, ed., The world’s major languages, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987:636).

Ch. 3, one of the most innovative of the tome’s chapters, examines the use of bir ‘one’ as the indefinite article (55–94). The author considers bir as a ‘pragmatic indefinite article’ following the analysis of others; however, he convincingly corrects the perceptions of his predecessors by adding the viewpoint that ‘it is not the article alone which triggers pragmatic referentiality of a new referent. Sentence constructions and the absence of the pragmatic operation of topic establishment parallel to the introduction of the new referent also do’ (69). One sentence worthy of follow-up, which may contain an indefinite article in its English translation, is beni ağrı sok-tu ‘a bee has stung me/bees have stung me’ (77, fn. 13 [sic]), since this was the only sentence found by the author of an incorporated subject with a transitive verb taking a direct object . (The word ‘bee’ is misspelled and should be arı, and one native speaker from Istanbul I asked rejected the second aforementioned translation giving beni arılar sok-tu for ‘bees have stung me’.)

Ch. 4 concerns itself with the so-called numeral classifier tane (95–109). The conclusion is that it is notyet known whether tane is a numeral classifier since ‘we do notknow enough aboutt he pragmatic function of numeral classifiers in other languages’ (109). Since this word has been borrowed from Persian (‘grain’, ‘berry’, etc.), and since it is a numeral classifier in Persian, I agree with Schroeder that it mighthave been borrowed as a lexical item and also as a classifier (98). Expressions such as bir tane adam ‘a/one man’ or üç tane çocuk ‘three children’ (98) were rejected by my native consultant since tane could not occur with human referents in the aforementioned phrases in isolation, i.e. bir adam is the most exact translation for ‘a man’.

Ch. 5 deals with subject-verb plural agreement (111–25); Ch. 6 focuses on the third person singular possessive suffix (127–88); Ch. 7 covers postpredicate position (189–99); and Ch. 8 has two concluding remarks (201–7), one of which is that the plural marker -lar in sular yine kesilmiş ‘(all) the water has been cut off again’ contrasts with the lack of it...