Sentence Structure Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

ON DEICTIC FUNCTION OF POSSESSIVE SUFIX- (s)I AND THE PRONOUNS BU AND ŞU IN CONTEMPORARY TURKISH -
This paper deals with specific cases of deictic use of possessive sufix -(s)I and demonstrative pronouns BU and ŞU which are generally not listed as deictic items in the existing grammer books of the Turkish language. Deictic function of the possessive sufix -(s)I has been treated at two levels: a) idiomatic and b) gramatical. At the idiomatic level this morphem, owing to its ever present deictic capacity, is used in formation of a certain number of sentence connectors (doğru-su, kısaca-sı, etc.), adverbs and adverbial phrases (akşamlar-ı, vakt-i-nde, inad-ı-na, bütün-ü-yle, boylu boy-u-nca, etc.) and idioms (devam-ı var, zarar-ı yok, etc.) which, as such, imply a reference of the exophoric or endophoric nature. At the grammatical level however, the deictis arrows of the possessive sufix -(s)I are anaphoricaly pointed to the antecedent, which can be a noun, nominal phrase, predicating verb, with or without complements, of the preceding sentence, or the whole preceding text. The obligatory anaphoric reference marked by this morphem in the analized syntactic models and situationally-contextual patterns can be realized in Serbocroat as following alternatives: a) not possible (cf.7.1/a,b,c, d), b) possible, but not obligatory (cf.7.1./e,t) and, e) obligatory with a demonstrative pronoun (cf.7.1./g). The analysis of the referential meanings of the demonstrative pronouns BU (ovaj, a, o) and ŞU (taj, a, o) includes two aspects: lexical and semanticaly syntactic one. As in the case of analizing the possessive sufix -(s)I, we had to take into account syntactic analysis of the text taken as a whole (the linguistics of the text). The referential meaning of the given demonstratives issues out of their primary, exophoric function: the pronoun BU denotes a closer, ie. determined and already known denoted item, whereas the pronoun ŞU an item which is yet to be explicated, determined. In other words, the former (BU) has always the anaphoric reference, whereas the latter, ŞU cataphoric one, regardless of whether the sentence which is in the function of the denoted item is in a coordinating or subordinate relation with the sentence to which they formally belong. (The same applies to all derivatives of these pronouns: adverbs, adverbial phrases, conjunctions, connectors etc.). Contrastively viewed, the deictic function of the pronouns "ovaj" and "onaj" in Serbocroat is with no such strict dividing lines. And finally, we would like to say that the contrastive approach to this problem, though not of a primary importance, was still necessary because of the following reasons: a) deixis is differently realized in Turkish and Serbocroat according to their essentially different grammatical systems, b) if the referential capacity were not explicated by the possessive sufix -(s)I and the demonstratives BU and ŞU it may lead to those so-called "typical" mistakes made by non-native speakers, particulary at the beginners level.