THE TYPOLOGY OF QUANTITATIVE QUALIFIERS MARKING “MULTIPLE, EXCESSIVE, EXTREME” IN OLD TURKIC

Abstract

Adjectives and adverbs, which are responsible for qualifying nouns, nouns and verbs according to the common and classical grammatical approach, are units that characterize these word categories from a wide variety of aspects. The fact that the same lexical units qualify both nouns and denominal words and verbs is related to their syntactic duties. In this respect, the units in the category with available functions are called “qualifiers”. Considering that the most convenient approach for the typology of world languages is to evaluate historical periods diachronically, the importance of archaic forms for qualifiers will come to the fore even more. Therefore, in order to study the qualifiers of Turkic, thefirst written inventory of the language in question and the various circles included in the scope of this period (VIII-XI century) will be the field from which the most appropriate data document will be obtained. Because the texts written in this period, especially in the Buddhist and Islamic environment, are very rich in terms of qualifiers. In this article, typologies of qualifiers identified in the first written inventory of Turkic between the eighth and eleventh centuries are examined. Since the existence of quite a variety of qualifiers makes it difficult to study these units in Turkic, the study will focus on the quantity qualifiers declaring “multiple, excessive, extreme”and from this point of view, it will be tried to reach the general qualifier characters. The general anatomy of the qualifiers will be revealed with a classification over the grammaticalization stages, conceptual relations and syntactic sequences of the quantity qualifiers to be discussed. In this way, both diachronic and synchronicfindings will be reached and findings that will contribute to language universality and language typology will be revealed.