Turkish has three morphological means of expressing negation, the verbal suffix –me- and two particles, değil and yok for nominal and existential negation. The distribution between the three of them is clear-cut. There is a lot to learn about negation and I thought it would be useful for me and others to collect the grammar of negation and negation-related issues post by post into one thread.
-me- is the primary means used for negating verbal sentences and subordinate clauses.
Ağaçları kes|me|yecekler. ‘They will not cut down the trees.’
Ayşenin durumu bil|me|diğini hiç bir zaman düşün|me|dim. ‘I never thought Ayşe didn’t know the situation.’
If the sentences are small the negation marker can be either in the main clause or the subclause:
Zeki’yi Fransızca konuşuyor addet|mi|yorlar./ Zeki’yi Fransızca konuş|mu|yor addediyorlar. ‘They don’t think Zeki speaks French.’
If the main clause verb is bilmek, though, -me- is necessarily in the subclause:
Nuran’ı daha ehliyetini al|ma|dı biliyordum. ‘I knew Nuran didn’t still get her driver’s licence.’
The equivalents of English indirect questions are in Turkish formed with the –ip…-me- construction:
Çocukları tatile götürüp götür|me|meye henüz karar ver|me|diler. ‘They didn’t still decide whether or not to take the children on holiday.’
Elif kalıp kal|ma|yacağını söyledi mi? ´Did Elif say if she is going to stay or not?’
Bilgisayarımın güncel olup ol|ma|dığını nasıl belirleyebilirim? ‘How can I determine if my computer is up-to-date?’
My grammar book says in constructions where verbs like olmak, durmak, vermek are used as auxiliaries –me- can be added on either the lexical verb or the auxiliary, but the meaning changes. Let’s see how it works. If the lexical verb is negated it means the action doesn’t take place. If, instead, the auxiliary is negated the full performance of the action is denied. This is an old example of –r/mez oldu ‘to become a habit’ from tunci:
Son zamanlarda birbirimizi gör|me|z olduk. ‘We didn’t see each other regularly any more recently (earlier we did).’
If it was
Son zamanlarda birbirimizi görür ol|ma|dık
could it be understood ‘We didn’t (succeed to) make it a habit to see each other regularly recently’?
(I used old threads, Göksel – Kerslake 2005 and Gerjan van Schaak, Studies in Turkish Grammar 1.2.5. Negation.)
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