I don´t think anything, scalpel. I am just trying to imitate native users, often with plenty of work and little success. What I am asking here all the time is models to follow.

I wonder if we could put it this way: the tense of the predicate tells us the point in time from which we look at the action. What is it called? Reference point? Then we choose which one of the personal participles to use:  -ecek- or -dik-. The division of labour between them, could it be

         -ecek-: future, the time after the reference point

         -dik-: everything else ?

Someone has already translated it here:

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070715150548AAZNwBq

Yalnızlar Rıhtımı

Bir benmiyim perişan,

Gecenin karanlığında.

Yosun tuttu gözlerim,

Yanlızlar rıhtımında.

Bütün gece ağladım,

Dalgalar kucağımda.

Yosun tuttu gözlerim,

Yanlızlar rıhtımında.

Bir benimi unuttular,

Uçup gitti martılar.

Geceler senle deniz,

Yanlızlar rıhtımında.

Bütün gece ağladım,

Dalgalar kucağımda.

Yosun tuttu gözlerim,

Yanlızlar rıhtımında

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KkR6LlFOW4

I don´t like gerekmek but unfortunately it seems to like me.

When I find a simple rule that fits my simple thinking I tend to capture it. Like what gokuyum recently wrote in another thread:

And now, scalpel, you say:

It´s not fare to compare two different statements from two teachers and two different contexts but you know my intention is pure and I am just trying to explain why it is difficult for me to understand how these sentences are organized on the time-line.

I am a big headache, I know. Actually I already got what I wanted to know. It doesn´t all have to be clear at once. There are threads which I can always dig from the bottom of the Language section pile when I find something new. The one with the headline gerekmek seems to have become one of them.

The longest (and most interesting) discussions are often about the minimalism and ambiguity of Turkish sentences. Turkish expressions are tied to their context in a way which is different from any other language I have learned. Some philosophy to the end:

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.)

But I just saw tunci here.

But what is it that ties this necessity into the past? Is it only the adverbial of time? (The nature of necessity is future, it kind of belongs to its definition. This is what was bothering me in the first place.)

For sure you cannot force gerekmek into the past tense indirect question (type a in my question).

Fine, scalpel. But the most interesting combination is the one with sg 3rd and sg 3rd because there are two possible ways to see it. What you say means that this diye part is an independent wholeness  -  it doesn´t take orders from outside.

My Try for the first part of it:

I love you so much, I am addicted to you. But that´s the destiny, we are so far away from one another. And your family doesn´t want me. What shall we do in this situation? The last answer is yours.

This is a meaningful difference.