Clausal Complementation in Balkan Turkish
Final Report Abstract
The present project constitutes a significant advance in our knowledge on the morphosyntactic realizations of clausal complementation in Balkan Turkish, it provides a comprehensive inventory of the structural variation attested in the Turkish dialects of the Balkan Peninsula and displays the distribution of the different structural types. The picture produced by the results of the project can be related to the complementation strategies attested in the contact languages. In the Western dialects, subjunctive strategies are particularly prolific, a fact that corresponds to the phenomenon of loss of the infinitive that can be observed in the Balkan languages, especially in Macedonian, Bulgarian, the Torlak dialects of Serbian, and Greek. On the other hand there is also a non-finite complementation strategy in the Western dialects, mainly available in same-subject constructions and in impersonal constructions, but occasionally also in subject clauses, etc. This innovative infinitive-type complementation strategy, which has arisen due to a spread of an originally relatively marginal strategy throughout the language system of certain dialects, resembles the development of a renewed infinitive in Albanian, a language that has lost its old Indo-European infinitive and replaced it by subjunctive constructions, but also developed a new infinitive (the so-called Paskajore). Language contact has certainly played a critical role both in the rise and spread of subjunctive constructions and in the renewal of the infinitive in Western Balkan Turkish. The data from the project also shows that towards the East the subjunctive strategy becomes less and less prolific throughout individual varieties, being confined to only a few complement-taking items such as lazim ‘necessary’ and istemek ‘to want’, in Eastern Thrace even almost exclusively to istemek. This situation is noteworthy as it obtains in a contact setting where subjunctive constructions are highly common; in other words, in the East, language contact influence is less effective in the structures under investigation. The infinitive in -mAGA ~ -mAĀ ~ -mA ~ -mA, while highly prolific in Bulgaria, parts of Macedonia, and in Kosovo, is much less pervasive in Eastern Thrace, where constructions also available in Standard Turkish are more common. In terms of morphosyntax, the dialects of Eastern Thrace can be said to be significantly more conservative than the highly contact-influenced Western dialects.
