Turkish Aspect through Cognitive Grammar
Keywords:
Cognitive Grammar, Turkish aspect, Grammaticalization, Source-domain retention, SubjectificationSynopsis
This book investigates the cognitive foundations of tense-aspect-mood (TAM) grammaticalization through a systematic analysis of five Turkish aspectual markers — -(I)yor, -(A)r, -mAktA, -DI, and -mIş — within the framework of Langacker's Cognitive Grammar. It advances the source-domain retention hypothesis: the claim that grammaticalization schematizes rather than erases the cognitive structure of the source domain, so that a marker's synchronic extension profile is predictable from the structural properties of its etymological source. The progressive -(I)yor, derived from the Old Turkic motion verb yörü- 'walk,' retains a trajectory-based sequential scanning operation that enables extensions to futurate, habitual, historical present, exclamative, and near-miss functions. The formal imperfective -mAktA, derived from a locative-infinitive construction, retains a static containment schema that systematically blocks these same extensions. The evidential -mIş, derived from a resultative participle, retains a post-event vantage point that produces epistemic non-authority across inferential, reportative, and mirative contexts. The aorist -(A)r and the perfective -DI, whose etymological sources are opaque, exhibit maximally general construal profiles determined by systemic opposition rather than source-domain inheritance — a pattern the hypothesis predicts. The five markers are shown to occupy complementary positions within a two-dimensional construal space defined by scanning mode and subjectivity. Cross-Turkic evidence from Old Turkic, Chalkan, Khakas, and Shor confirms that different source domains — motion verbs, posture verbs, locative predicates — consistently produce different aspectual profiles across the language family. The book contributes to Cognitive Grammar theory through the concepts of multi-stranded immanence and the transparency gradient, and to grammaticalization theory by replacing the metaphor of semantic bleaching with a mechanism of selective schematization in which cognitive structure persists through grammatical change.
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