Ordering patterns

Abstract

After an extensive account of the basics of Turkish grammar, this chapter offers nothing but ordering principles: the first two sections are about the morphotactics of nouns and verbs, and noun phrase structure. All this is represented in tabular form. The ordering principles for noun phrases (including adverbial and postpositional phrases) in a clause is dealt with next, and thus, constituent order in nominal, existential, and verbal sentences is discussed in the third section. Dependent clauses are the topic of the fourth section, which also gives an overview of verbal linking suffixes to form such clauses. The final section shows that constituent ordering in verbal sentences can better be understood in terms of the pragmatic notions Topic and Focus than in terms of traditional distribution of Subject and Objects (SOV).