A Fresh Look at the Tense-aspect System of Turkish
Turkish is one of the best described languages of the world. One should therefore expect a large consensus with regards to the way Turkish grammar is described. However, once we compare different grammatical descriptions of Turkish, we find an astonishing variation of analyses. One domain whose description is particularly unsatisfactory is the tense-aspect system. The paper will show that forms like okuyor, okur, okuyacak, and okumu? are participles marked for aspect, but not for tense. Failure to recognize the zero-exponence of present tense has lead to the erroneous analysis of aspectual morphemes as tense markers. Comparison with the tense marking on non-verbal predicates shows however that present tense is neither marked on the noun/adjective/adverbial/participle, nor part of the meaning of the subject cross-reference markers. It is marked by the absence of the other member of the tense paradigm, past tense. In addition to an inadequate semantic description of the progressive aspect suffix -iyor, many grammars present a diachronically motivated form -(I)yor, which requires elaborate morphophonological rules to produce the synchronically correct verb forms. This segmentation should be revised by acknowledging the morphological inclusion of the original linking vowel into the suffix, which allows for a much more elegant description. Finally, the paper will draw attention to the crosslinguistic confusion caused by the term ‘aorist’ and advocates the term ‘dispositive aspect’ instead. In the same vein, ‘prospective aspect’ is a more adequate term for participles in -ecek than ‘future tense’. An interesting consequence of the present analysis is that Turkish has a simple past marked by a cumulative morpheme -ti which fills both the aspectual and the temporal slot of the verb form, but no simple present, as all present tense forms require overt aspectual marking. Tense is thus an inflectional category of the predicate, be it verbal or non-verbal, while aspect is an inflectional category of verbs. The paper is relevant for linguists interested in Turkish in general as well as readers interested in tense and aspect, and may contribute to improvements in Turkish language education by providing a more consistent account of the morphological structure of temporal and aspectual forms and their use.