Clause combining in Balkan Turkic: Pathways and stages of contact-induced grammaticalization

This project is the second phase of Head directionality change in Turkic in contact situations: A diachronic comparison between heritage Turkish and Balkan Turkic and a supplement to the project Dynamics of discourse organization in language contact (PIs: Shanley Allen, Christoph Schroeder, Heike Wiese), which is part of the second phase of the Research Unit “Emerging Grammars” (RUEG2, FOR 2537). It is also connected to the project Clause combining and word order in heritage Turkish across majority languages from the first phase of RUEG.

The contact-induced changes in the grammatical means of encoding all kinds of dependent clause are conspicuous in varieties of Balkan Turkic: Many of these varieties clearly prefer postpositive finite dependent clauses with clause-initial connectors (‘Standard Average European’-type), whereas the closest varieties of Turkic (i.e. standard Turkish and most other Turkish dialects) prefer prepositive nonfinite dependent clauses and clause-final connectors (if any at all). In addition to the SAE-type common dependent clauses, the earlier Head directionality project observed several other types of dependent clause in Balkan Turkic in various sources and from various locales. These dependent clauses are peculiar in their structure in that they fit neither the Turkic nor the SAE model perfectly. They can be prepositive like typical Turkic dependent clauses but can also simultaneously be finite and introduced by a clause-initial connector like typical SAE dependent clauses. These ‘aberrant’ dependent clauses in Balkan Turkic have not been studied with any systematicity. They are only briefly mentioned by a few sources without noting their extraordinary character and the goal of revealing the patterns that underlie them. We believe these structures to be the intermediary forms of a linguistic system in transition from Turkic-type to SAE-type syntax, and that a diachronic typological approach to this diversity of dependent clauses promises to provide insights also into the changes taking place in these domains in heritage Turkish in contact with SAE languages (e.g. German, English).

The project team consists of Cem Keskin (postdoc, University of Potsdam), Christoph Schroeder (PI, U Potsdam), Shanley Allen (TU Kaiserslautern), Heike Wiese (HU Berlin), Kateryna Iefremenko (PhD-researcher, University of Potsdam), Lale Dikilitaş (student assistant), and Taner Sezer (corpus specialist). Our external cooperation partners are Matthias Kappler (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), Jaklin Kornfilt (Syracuse University), Yaron Matras (Aston University / University of Manchester), and Astrid Menz (University of Hamburg).