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About Word Order
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1.       Abla
3648 posts
 16 Aug 2011 Tue 07:10 pm

Once the poor learner has got a basic idea of the Turkish word order and wants to familiarize herself with the real language instead of staring at the textbook examples she will have to deal with sentences like

Yaşama sevinci ve özgürlük, kaslarına enerji olarak gitmek üzere hızla akıyor damarlarından sanki

or

Yatıya gelen misafirleri...davet edildikleri saatten beş dakika geç gelirlerse bir bahana bulunup kabul edilmezler eve, son anda biri hastalenıverir falan. (Yüksel Peker)

"Ok", she says to herself, "I have been told that in literary art you will find word orders which differ from the standard." She doesn´t complain. Very rarely in this life what you learn in the beginning is the whole truth. But the problem is she doesn´t understand. The strict word order which was once difficult to get used to now seems like a base map which helped to understand the wholeness of the sentence. The above word chains give little clue about the grammatical relationships between sentence constituents even if the learner can name the morphological forms. Which words belong together, how to analyze the sentence?



Edited (8/16/2011) by Abla

2.       si++
3785 posts
 16 Aug 2011 Tue 09:22 pm

Have you seen this thread before?:

http://www.turkishclass.com/forumTitle_49602

3.       Abla
3648 posts
 16 Aug 2011 Tue 10:08 pm

Yep. It´s a fascinating puzzle when natives put the pieces together. But when you are alone with these long sentences where standard word order has been broken it takes time to get used to it. I mean I can scarcely understand the above examples but I feel I guessed half of it. It´s enough to throw one part of a compound to the end of the sentence like

              Çalışırken farkına varmıyorum soğuğun

and it takes a long time for a yabancı to understand how it should be read.

But I do understand the reason: as the sentence constituents are all grammatically marked it gives a chance to the speaker to trifle with the word order. In Finnish the word order is said to be "free but meaningful": you have free hands but you always change the meaning of the sentence by mixing the words. The Turkish rules look very strict in the beginning (they resembled me of German) but practically SOV seems to be only a useful guideline.

4.       si++
3785 posts
 17 Aug 2011 Wed 10:04 pm

 

Quoting Abla

Yep. It´s a fascinating puzzle when natives put the pieces together. But when you are alone with these long sentences where standard word order has been broken it takes time to get used to it. I mean I can scarcely understand the above examples but I feel I guessed half of it. It´s enough to throw one part of a compound to the end of the sentence like

              Çalışırken farkına varmıyorum soğuğun

and it takes a long time for a yabancı to understand how it should be read.

But I do understand the reason: as the sentence constituents are all grammatically marked it gives a chance to the speaker to trifle with the word order. In Finnish the word order is said to be "free but meaningful": you have free hands but you always change the meaning of the sentence by mixing the words. The Turkish rules look very strict in the beginning (they resembled me of German) but practically SOV seems to be only a useful guideline.

 

Yes they are marked which is the key point for free formatted word order.

 

As far as genitive case goes as in your example, I think Turkish is unique in that it marks both the possessor and the possessed:

Possessor+genitive possessed+possessive suffix

 

Erdem´in görmesi = the fact that Erdem saw (something)

Erdem´in Berke´nin girdiğini görmesi = the fact that Erdem saw Berke enter (somewhere)

Erdem´in Berke´nin Bilge´nin evine girdiğini görmesi = the fact that Erdem saw Berke enter Bilge´s house

 

Now to what extent can we scramble it?

Bilge´nin evine girdiğini Berke´nin görmesi Erdem´in (yes why not? They were 3 one inside another and now they are sequential)

 

 

 

5.       Abla
3648 posts
 17 Aug 2011 Wed 10:25 pm

You can´t mean that this last sentence can still be understood? How do you figure out which possessor+possessed couples belong together? From the context?

I have read about izafet relationships recently and I have an idea there is a huge expressing power inside them. Many chains need a long explanation before they can be understood in another language.

6.       si++
3785 posts
 17 Aug 2011 Wed 10:35 pm

 

Quoting Abla

You can´t mean that this last sentence can still be understood? How do you figure out which possessor+possessed couples belong together? From the context?

yes it can still be understood even without a context. With a context you can even have more freedom in scrambling it:

Girdiğini evine Bilge´nin görmesi Erdem´in Berke´nin

 

I have read about izafet relationships recently and I have an idea there is a huge expressing power inside them. Many chains need a long explanation before they can be understood in another language.

İzafet relationships? Where did you read it? Somewhere on the web?

 

7.       Abla
3648 posts
 17 Aug 2011 Wed 10:38 pm

Turkish Grammar, Geoffrey Lewis.

8.       Abla
3648 posts
 24 Aug 2011 Wed 11:02 am

Learned some more about word order. Lewis gives two relatively safe ways of breaking the usual word order. One of them is breaking the possessive izafet group which was discussed above. The result is very neat and unambiguous because both partners of the marriage are marked. Another one is called sentence-plus by some grammarians: qualifiers are added to the end of a sentence that is already grammatically complete in itself.

         Kayseri´de bir damadı var, doktor.

This type sounds conversational, but they say it is frequent in old texts.

The question that rises is why these changes are done. Poets often break rules in order to express something new, I understand that, but what about ordinary speakers? I have a theory.

I always had a feeling Turkish speakers think differently. Most of the learners in this site speak an SVO language. It means dropping the information little by little, taking your time, adding some things that come to your mind while you are pronouncing your sentence. It doesn´t need much concentration, you just let it flow. But if you want to say something in standard Turkish, you need to have the thought clear and well sorted in your head before you even open your mouth. Otherwise the place of modifiers just slips from your lips before you decide what to put there. What I say looks like a joke and maybe it is but there are linguists who find explanations for language phenomena trying to study the utterance as a simple chain of words instead of getting deep into their mutual relations. Changing the word order gives the Turkish speaker air and oxygen to let it flow, of course in the limits of syntactic ruling and the context.

These are just thoughts. Not that I would ever intentionally break the word order. At least not for some years. But you can´t escape the fact that natives do.

9.       si++
3785 posts
 24 Aug 2011 Wed 11:34 am

 

Quoting Abla

Learned some more about word order. Lewis gives two relatively safe ways of breaking the usual word order. One of them is breaking the possessive izafet group which was discussed above. The result is very neat and unambiguous because both partners of the marriage are marked. Another one is called sentence-plus by some grammarians: qualifiers are added to the end of a sentence that is already grammatically complete in itself.

         Kayseri´de bir damadı var, doktor.

This type sounds conversational, but they say it is frequent in old texts.

The question that rises is why these changes are done. Poets often break rules in order to express something new, I understand that, but what about ordinary speakers? I have a theory.

I always had a feeling Turkish speakers think differently. Most of the learners in this site speak an SVO language. It means dropping the information little by little, taking your time, adding some things that come to your mind while you are pronouncing your sentence. It doesn´t need much concentration, you just let it flow. But if you want to say something in standard Turkish, you need to have the thought clear and well sorted in your head before you even open your mouth. Otherwise the place of modifiers just slips from your lips before you decide what to put there. What I say looks like a joke and maybe it is but there are linguists who find explanations for language phenomena trying to study the utterance as a simple chain of words instead of getting deep into their mutual relations. Changing the word order gives the Turkish speaker air and oxygen to let it flow, of course in the limits of syntactic ruling and the context.

These are just thoughts. Not that I would ever intentionally break the word order. At least not for some years. But you can´t escape the fact that natives do.

 

Yes maintaining SOV order in collequial language is difficult and many times we break it. But we maintain it in written language. Listen to the news on TV or radio and you will hear only SOV ordered sentences.

 

I will copy some stuff for you which you may like (Source: here just in case):

 

Word order

In linguistics, word order typology refers to the study of the order of the syntactic constituents of a language, and how different languages can employ different orders. Correlations between orders found in different syntactic subdomains are also of interest.

Some languages have relatively restrictive word orders, often relying on the order of constituents to convey important grammatical information. Others, often those that convey grammatical information through inflection, allow more flexibility which can be used to encode pragmatic information such as topicalisation or focus. Most languages however have some preferred word order which is used most frequently.

For most languages, basic word order can be defined in terms of the finite verb (V) and its arguments, the subject (S) and object (O). The latter are typically noun phrases, although some languages do not have a major word class of nouns .

There are six theoretically possible basic word orders for the transitive sentence: subject verb object (SVO), subject object verb (SOV), verb subject object (VSO), verb object subject (VOS), object subject verb (OSV) and object verb subject (OVS). The overwhelming majority of the world´s languages are either SVO or SOV, with a much smaller but still significant portion using VSO word order. The remaining three arrangements are exceptionally rare, with VOS being slightly more common than OVS, and OSV being significantly more rare than two preceding ones.

Finding the basic word order

It is not always easy to find the basic word order of S, O and V. First, not all languages make use of the categories of subject and object. It is difficult to determine the order of elements one cannot identify in the first place. If subject and object can be identified, the problem can arise that different orders prevail in different contexts. For instance, French has SVO for nouns, but SOV when pronouns are involved; German has verb-medial order in main clauses, but verb-final order in subordinate clauses. In other languages the word order of transitive and intransitive clauses may not correspond. Russian, for example, has SVO transitive clauses but free order (SV or VS) in intransitive clauses. To have a valid base for comparison, the basic word order is defined as

declarative
main clause
S and O must both be nominal arguments
pragmatically neutral, i.e. no element has special emphasis

While the first two of these requirements are relatively easy to respect, the latter two are more difficult. In spoken language, there are hardly ever two full nouns in a clause; the norm is for the clause to have at most one noun, the other arguments being pronouns. In written language, this is somewhat different, but that is of no help when investigating oral languages. Finally, the notion of "pragmatically neutral" is difficult to test. While the English sentence "The king, they killed." has a heavy emphasis on king, in other languages, that order (OSV) might not carry a significantly higher emphasis than another order.

If all the requirements above are met, it still sometimes turns out that languages do not seem to prefer any particular word order. The last resort is text counts, but even then, some languages must be analyzed as having two (or even more) word orders.

Sentence word orders

These are all possible word orders for the subject, verb, and object in the order of most common to rarest: SOV is the order used by the largest number of distinct languages; languages using it include the prototypical Japanese, Mongolian, Basque, Turkish, Korean, the Indo-Aryan languages and the Dravidian languages. Some, like Persian and Latin, have SOV normal word order but conform less to the general tendencies of other such languages.
SVO languages include English, the Romance languages, Bulgarian, Chinese and Swahili, among others.
VSO languages include Classical Arabic, the Insular Celtic languages, and Hawaiian.
VOS languages include Fijian and Malagasy.
OVS languages include Hixkaryana.
OSV languages include Xavante and Warao.

Sometimes patterns are more complex: German, Dutch and Frisian have SOV in subordinates, but V2 word order in main clauses, SVO word order being the most common. Using the guidelines above, the unmarked word order is then SVO.

Others, such as Latin and Finnish, have no strict word order; rather, the sentence structure is highly flexible. Nonetheless, there is often a preferred order; in Latin, SOV is the most frequent outside of poetry, and in Finnish SVO is the most frequent, and obligatory when case marking fails to disambiguate argument roles, for example Puun kaatoi mies (tree-acc fell-perf man.NOM) ~ A/the man felled the tree but puut kaatoivat miehet (tree-pl.nom/acc fell-perf-3p.pl man-pl.nom/acc) ~ The trees felled the men. Just as languages may have different word orders in different contexts, so may they have both fixed and free word orders. For example, Russian has a relatively fixed SVO word order in transitive clauses, but a much freer SV / VS order in intransitive clauses.

Functions of sentence word order

A fixed or prototypical word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear. Another method is to label the constituents in some way, for example with case marking, agreement, or another marker. Fixed word order reduces expressiveness but added marking increases information load in the speech stream, and for these reasons strict word order seldom occurs together with strict morphological marking, one counter-example being Persian.

Observing discourse patterns, it is found that previously given information (topic) tends to precede new information (comment). Furthermore, acting participants (especially humans) are more likely to be talked about (to be topic) than things simply undergoing actions (like oranges being eaten). If acting participants are often topical, and topic tends to be expressed early in the sentence, this entails that acting participants have a tendency to be expressed early in the sentence. This tendency can then grammaticalize to a privileged position in the sentence, the subject.

The mentioned functions of word order can be seen to affect the frequencies of the various word order patterns: An overwhelming majority of languages have an order in which S precedes O and V. Whether V precedes O or O precedes V however, has been shown to be a very telling difference with wide consequences on phrasal word orders.

Knowledge of word order on the other hand can be applied to identify the thematic relations of the NPs in a clause of an unfamiliar language. If we can identify the verb in a clause, and we know that the language is strict accusative SVO, then we know that Grob smock Blug probably means that Grob is the smocker and Blug the entity smocked. However, since very strict word order is rare in practice, such applications of word order studies are rarely effective.

Phrase word orders and branching

The order of constituents in a phrase can vary as much as the order of constituents in a clause. Normally, the noun phrase and the adpositional phrase are investigated. Within the noun phrase, one investigates whether the following modifiers occur before or after the head noun

adjective (red house vs house red)
determiner (this house vs house this)
numeral (two houses vs houses two)
possessor (my house vs house my)
relative clause (the by me built house vs the house built by me)

Within the adpositional clause, one investigates whether the languages makes use of prepositions (in London), postpositions (London in), or both (normally with different adpositions at both sides).

There are several common correlations between sentence-level word order and phrase-level constituent order. For example, SOV languages generally put modifiers before heads and use postpositions. VSO languages tend to place modifiers after their heads, and use prepositions. For SVO languages, either order is common.

For example, French (SVO) uses prepositions (dans la voiture, à gauche), and places adjectives after (une voiture spacieuse). However, a small class of adjectives generally go before their heads (une grande voiture). On the other hand, in English (also SVO) adjectives almost always go before nouns (a big car), and adverbs can go either way, but initially is more common (greatly improved). (English has a very small number of adjectives that go after their heads, such as "extraordinaire", which kept its position when it was borrowed from French.)

Free word order

Some languages do not have a fixed word order. In these languages there is often a significant amount of morphological marking to disambiguate the roles of the arguments; however there are also languages in which word order is fixed even though the degree of marking would enable free word order, and languages with free word order, such as some varieties of Datooga, which have free word order combined with a lack of morphological distinction between arguments. Typologically there is a trend that highly animate actors are more likely to be topical than low-animate undergoers, this trend would come through even in free-word-order languages giving a statistical bias for SO order (or OS in the case of ergative systems, however ergative systems do not usually extend to the highest levels of animacy, usually giving way to some form of nominative system at least in the pronominal system). Most languages with a high degree of morphological marking have rather flexible word orders such as Latin, Hungarian, Russian (in intransitive clauses), and Finnish. In some of those, a canonical order can still be identified, but in others this is not possible.

Hungarian

In Hungarian, the enclitic -t marks the direct object. For "Kate ate a piece of cake", the possibilities are: "Kati megevett egy szelet tortát." (same word order as English) ["Kate ate a piece of cake."]
"Egy szelet tortát Kati evett meg." (emphasis on her) ["A piece of cake Kate ate."]
"Kati egy szelet tortát evett meg." (emphasis on cake) ["Kate a piece of cake ate."]
"Egy szelet tortát evett meg Kati." (emphasis on one) ["A piece of cake ate Kate."]
"Megevett egy szelet tortát Kati." (emphasis on completeness of action) ["Ate a piece of cake Kate."]
"Megevett Kati egy szelet tortát." (emphasis on completeness of action) ["Ate Kate a piece of cake."]

Other issues

In many languages, changes in word order occur due to topicalization or in questions. However, most languages are generally assumed to have a basic word order, called the unmarked word order; other, marked word orders can then be used to emphasize a sentence element, to indicate modality (such as an interrogative modality), or for other purposes.

For example, English is SVO (subject-verb-object), as in "I don´t know this", but OSV is also possible: "This I don´t know." This process is called topic-fronting (or topicalization) and is common. In English, OSV is a marked word order because it emphasises the object, and is often accompanied by a change in intonation.

An example of OSV being used for emphasis: A: I can´t see Alice. (SVO)
B: What about Bill?
A: Bill I can see. (OSV, rather than I can see Bill, SVO)

Non-standard word orders are also found in poetry in English, as well as in many other languages.

 

10.       si++
3785 posts
 24 Aug 2011 Wed 12:08 pm

Some statistics data for Turkish:

 

Percentage of different word orders
(based on 500 adult 100 child utterences)
Order Children / Adult Speech
SOV 46/48
OSV 7/8
SVO 17/25
OVS 20/13
VSO 10/6
VOS 0/0

Source: GENERATION OF TURKISH SURFACE FORM FROM A MORPHEMIC
LEXICON by BURCU KARAGÖL-AYAN

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