The structure of Diye clauses in Turkish

Abstract

This study investigates morpho-syntactic properties of the subordinator diye in Turkish, which is mentioned in a limited number of studies in the literature but not studied in a comprehensive way. An exhaustive analysis of TS Corpus and METU Corpus reveals that diye not only is a very frequent word in Turkish but also has various functions; it occurs in (i) CP level adverbial clauses denoting reason, purpose / result; (ii) VP level adverbials denoting manner with verbs including verbs of communication, perception and cognition, and emotion, and assumption, understanding, precaution, an agreement when verbs of cognition are dropped; (iii) adjectival clauses. Throughout this thesis, I focus on various tests to better understand that syntactic relationship between the matrix clause and the subordinate clause. The results indicate that (i) there is no unified diye, but two different realizations: non-decomposable (lexicalized) diye, and another one that can be decomposed into de+ye (say+Optative); (ii) connected to the decomposable diye, I argue that there is an operator that shifts the indexicals. The adverbials clauses with a decomposable diye are manner adverbials which by nature introduces the content of the verb de- „say‟. The only time diye cannot mark manner adverbials is when it occurs successively with the verb de- „say‟. I claim that because of the two operators that need to operate on the indexicals inside the quotations at the same time, the derivation crashes. However, when they do not occur successively, the derivation does not crash for prosodic reasons.