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.
|