Marking various aspects in Turkish Sign Language

Abstract

Abstract Sign languages have been reported to have manual signs that function as perfective morphemes (Fischer & Gough 1999; Meir 1999; Rathmann 2005; Duffy 2007; Zucchi et al. 2010). Turkish Sign Language (TİD) has also been claimed to have such morphemes (Zeshan 2003; Kubuş & Rathmann 2009; Dikyuva 2011; Gökgöz 2011; Karabüklü 2016) as well as a nonmanual completive marker (‘bn’) (Dikyuva 2011). This study shows that the nonmanual ‘bn’ is in fact a perfective morpheme. We examine its compatibility with different event types and furthermore show that TİD has a manual sign bı̇t (‘finish’) that is indeed the completive marker but with possibly unusual restrictions on its use. Based on their distribution, the current study distinguishes bı̇t and ‘bn’ as different morphemes even though they can co-occur. TİD is argued to be typologically different from other sign languages since it has both a nonmanual marker (‘bn’) for a perfective morpheme and a manual sign (bı̇t) with different selectional properties than the manual signs reported for other sign languages.