Old Anatolian Turkish: Syntactic structure

The purpose of this dissertation is to define the syntactic structure of Old Anatolian Turkish. For a complete syntactic study, I analyze three fourteenth-century Turkish prose works: al-Manzuma fi-l-Hilafiyyat, a law book, translated from Arabic; Qab usname, an advice book, translated from Persian, and Kitab-i Gunya, an original Turkish law treatise.;The fourteenth century was the formative age of Anatolian Turkish. Because a number of literary works were translated from Arabic and Persian into Turkish, Arabic and Persian linguistic elements had a major role in the making of the literary Turkish language during this period. Along with an extensive number of lexical items, Arabic and Persian structural properties such as the use of Indo-European and Semitic types of nominal phrases, conjunctions, and relative clauses played important roles in the formation of Turkish syntax. Despite its importance, syntax has been the most neglected subject in previous studies of Old Anatolian Turkish. And yet this period holds the key to the understanding of further developments in the history of the Turkish language. This in-depth study of the syntactic structure of Old Anatolian Turkish opens up a new approach and it leads to better understanding of both the formation of literary Anatolian Turkish and the literary dialects of the following periods.;This study which selects only those works copied or composed during the fourteenth century, provides an accurate account of Old Anatolian Turkish. I treat my subject in three chapters: In the first, I give a full account of the inflectional morphology which includes the plurality, possession and cases of the noun. Because the inflectional morphology explains the interrelationships between the syntactic elements, I examine the semantic-syntactic functions of the inflectional suffixes in detail. In this chapter, I also analyze and explain the syntactic features of adjectives, numbers, adverbs, postpositions and conjunctions.;In the second chapter, I explain verbal inflections. I elaborate on positive and negative stems, person, number, tense, mood, verbal nouns, participles and converbs.;In the third chapter, I analyze sentence structure per se. Here I expound on the parts of the sentence, agreement between subject and predicate, and sentence types: simple, compound and complex sentences.;I complete this work with samples from the source materials in transcript and translation, an index of grammatical forms, and a bibliography.