Positive Polarity in Turkish: a Corpus-based Study of ‘Oldukça’

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the syntactic and semantic properties of the degree adverb ‘oldukça’ in Turkish. In previous descriptive work, this adverb has been assigned various interpretations such as ‘quite’, ‘rather’ and ‘fairly’, generally appearing in the modifier position of another element. However, what is actually interesting about this lexical item is that its syntactic and semantic behavior seems to have significant implications for polarity sensitivity. Based on the findings of a corpus study (TS Corpus v2), I show that its syntactic distribution is rather constrained since it only appears in positive sentences, excluding negative ones as well as those like if-clauses and questions. Following recent work on polarity sensitivity in the language, I argue that the characteristics of oldukça can be accounted for by way of the semantic notion of (non)veridicality. In other words, oldukça occurs only in veridical contexts but not in nonveridical and antiveridical ones, which makes it a true positive polarity item. One implication of this study is that positive polarity items, just like their negative counterparts, come in different types and display certain variations both within and across languages.

Keywords

• Linguistics
• Positive polarity
• Positive polarity items
• (non)veridicality
• Turkish

Türkçede Olumlu Uçluk: ‘Oldukça’ Sözcüğü Üzerine Derlem Temelli Bir Çalışma

Öz

Bu makale Türkçede derece ifade eden oldukça belirtecinin sözdizimsel ve anlamsal özellikleriyle ilgilidir. Önceki betimlemeli çalışmalarda, bu belirtece İngilizcede karşılık gelen ‘epey’, ‘epeyce’ ve ‘hayli’ gibi çeşitli anlamlar yüklenmiş ve genellikle başka bir öge niteleyicisi konumunda yer aldığı öngörülmüştür. Bununla birlikte, bu sözcükle ilgili aslında ilginç olan şey, sözdizimsel ve anlambilimsel davranışının, uçluk duyarlılığı açısından önemli sezdirimlere sahip olduğudur. TS Corpus v2 derlemi baz alınarak yapılan bir derlem çalışmasının sonuçlarına dayanarak, bu belirtecin sözdizimsel dağılımının oldukça kısıtlı olduğu ve yalnızca olumlu tümcelerde yer aldığı gösterilmiştir. Yani, olumsuz tümceler ile şart tümceleri ve soru tümceleri gibi ortamlarda bulunmadığı gösterilmiştir. Bu çalışmada, dildeki kutupsallık duyarlılığı üzerine yapılan son çalışmalar baz alınarak oldukça belirtecinin özelliklerinin anlamsal bir nosyon olan doğrula(ma)ma kavramı yoluyla açıklanabileceği savunulmaktadır. Başka bir deyişle, oldukça belirteci sadece doğrulamalı bağlamlarda bulunur ve doğrulayıcı olmayan ve doğrulayıcı karşıtı bağlamlarda bulunmaz. Bu durum da onu gerçek bir olumlu uçluk ögesi yapmaktadır. Bu çalışmanın başka bir sonucu da olumlu uçluk ögelerinin, tıpkı olumsuz uçluk ögeleri gibi, farklı türlerde olması ve hem dil içinde hem de diller arasında belirli farklılıklar göstermeleridir.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Dilbilim
• olumlu uçluk
• olumlu uçluk öğesi
• doğrula(ma)ma
• Türkçe

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