Greek and Turkish Tenses - Research Paper Example

The placing of Turkish in relation to other languages is among the agglutinative languages because it involves a significant use of suffixes to produce variant forms including the tenses (Lewis, 2001; Gibson et al., 2010). They are also used to indicate the voice, modality, negation, tense-aspect-mood and person/number. The modulations are conditioned, however, by rules for vowel harmony. Various aspects of Turkish verb and tense structures have been studied, for example by Dahl (1985) on grammatical markings and tenses, Lewis (1967) and Underhill (1976) on the position of tense-aspect affixes, and Kornfit (1997), van Schaaik (1994), Kononov (1956), etc.

on specific structures (Haspelmath et al., 2005). In addition, Aksu-Koc and Slobin (1982; 1986) for example, examined the semantic distinctions and coding of evidentiality (see reported past tense). Other scholars such as Erguvanli-Taylan (1996), Kocaman (1996) and Yavas (1982) have also given details of the semantic and pragmatic aspects of Turkish tenses. Some scholars have all given attention to studying how the Turkish tenses are acquired. For example, Aksu (1978) studied children’s acquisition of the past tense and examined aspect and modality.

As far as classifying the Turkish tenses is concerned, early classifications made by classical grammarians such as Kononov (1956), Gencan (1975) and Underhill (1976), distinguished between absolute and relative tenses. Absolute tenses are “organized around the moment of speech” whereas relative tenses “take as their reference time one different from the moment of speech” (Aksu-Koc, 1988: 20). A tripartite division into past, present, and future was expected but as noted by Lyons (1977), this overestimated the significance of the future tense in Turkish, which as noted by Comrie (1985) is better described as having a binary system.

Thus, Yavas (1980) distinguished only between the past and non-past.