Descriptive gaps: The case of transitive et- article Gerjan van Schaaik Turkic Languages, Volume 26 (2022), Issue 2, Page 89 - 122 The Turkish transitive verb et- suffers from a considerable lack of attention in the linguistic literature. It is usually analysed as the pre-eminent means to form a composite verb on the basis of a noun or adjective. On the other hand, its status as a pure auxiliary is doubtful, given the fact that it pops up as a participle in relative clauses and that it governs the accusative for definite objects. Whereas it is often assumed that ziyaret ‘visit’ is fused with et- into the derivation ziyaret et- (-i), i.e. accusative, as an unbreakable unit, constructions such as Bu seyahat-i et-mek üzere kayığ-a bin-di-m ‘I boarded the caique in order to make this journey’ with accusative marked ziyaret-i and relative clauses such as Türkiye’ye et-tiğ-im ziyaret ‘the trip I made to Turkey’ seem to contradict this assumption. In connection with the partial replacement of et- ‘to do’ by yap- ‘to do/make’ in recent decades, especially among speakers of Turkish in the diaspora, the question may be raised whether the popularity of et- as an independent transitive verb on the internet can somehow be linked to this phenomenon.
Place nouns heading relative clauses with focal subjects article Gerjan van Schaaik Turkic Languages, Volume 21 (2017), Issue 1, Page 79 - 106 Many grammars of Turkish give little attention to a type of construction which has puzzled quite a number of linguists trying to formalize the distribution of the so-called subject participle (SP) and the object participle (OP), the latter also known as the nonsubject participle. A subject participle is used in three cases: when its subject is (i) the head of the RC; (ii) a constituent in a possessive relation with the head; and (iii) a nonreferential noun phrase. In all other cases the object participle applies. The present contribution provides a pragmatic analysis of the latter type of construction and proposes the name Focus-Locus Construction, showing that the subject is a non-referential noun phrase that is always placed in preverbal (focus) position and that the head noun of the relative clause can without exception be interpreted as a noun denoting location (locus). Such structures are presentative constructions providing new information, and they are related to existential constructions because they express “places where things happen”.
