Abstract
This paper investigates phenomena of postpredicativity in a Turkish- Kurmanji Kurdish-German trilingual corpus of spoken language. Starting from the assumption that postpredicativity when viewed in this trilingual perspective is an epiphenomenal effect of argument type in Kurmanji, finite verb movement in German and discourse activation status (next to illocutionarily motivated verb fronting) in Turkish, it sets out to explore overlaps and double motivations. Based on a collection of 1,211 findings, differentiations within the categories as well as overlaps at several levels are identified. Central results are discourse-level motivations in Kurmanji, their dependence on syntactic size, and overlaps between illocutional verb fronting and discourse activation status in Turkish.
Highlights
For Turkish the placement of NPs and similar elements in postpredicative positions has been functionally related to discourse planning and information structure, roughly speaking, thetopic-focus system (Bainbridge 1972, Erguvanlı 1984, Schroeder 1995, Erdal 1999)
LiLaC and RUBA were collected as part of an interdisciplinary project on the subjective experience of bureaucracy, in the German Ruhr Region in 2009, in German and Turkish respectively,2 while the topics of the ongoing SÎNEM collection have more of a cultural focus; all three contain language-biographical passages
An information written as ‘Celal, Kurmanji-Turkish (> 6)-German (> 20)’ means that according to what the participant said in the conversation, he acquired Kurmanji Kurdish from birth, Turkish after entering primary school at around six, and German when he came to Germany as a young man
Summary
This study assembles Turkish, Kurmanji Kurdish and German data from three spoken-language corpora under construction: LiLaC, RUBA and SÎNEM (Herkenrath in preparation a, b, c) into one trilingual supercorpus, for the purposes of the present study. The overview table in the appendix lists the concordanced corpus passages collected in the three languages with numbers of findings as well as providing information on conversational topics and speakers’ multilingual repertoires. Regarding the issue of any heritage status of their languages, among those who spent their childhood in Germany, Zanyar is a productive writer and speaker in Kurmanji Kurdish at the time of the recording; his Turkish is not mentioned during the conversation. The data cover two segments of what I consider a more or less connected community of Turkish-(Kurdish-)German speakers in Germany. This section reviews some issues under discussion in Turkish and Kurdish linguistics, including a brief typological look at German
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