On the double use of katiyen in Turkish: A corpus analysis

Turkish has a negative concord item (NCI) katiyen ‘never’ that functions as an adverb and generally requires the presence of sentential negation in the sentence (Kelepir, 2001; Göksel and Kerslake, 2005). Yakut-Kubaş (2022), in a recent work, on the other hand, argues that katiyen can also appear in certain non-negative structures. She proposes that these two uses of the word in negative and non-negative structures can be captured in a unified manner if we assume that katiyen is an element that marks the highest degree of subjective certainty expressed by the speaker. In that sense, this pragmatic function is argued to bring these two uses together. In this work, based on a large-scale corpus work that includes 648 sentences containing the word, I will show that katiyen is essentially ambiguous that has distinct semantic and pragmatic meanings with different syntactic distributions. First, it is primarily an NCI that requires the presence of sentential negation at all times and is interpreted as ‘never’ or ‘in no way’. This use accounts for 619 instances of katiyen in the corpus data and shows that more than 95% of the time it predominantly functions as an NCI. Second, it can appear in two structurally non-negative structures: (i) 14 instances of syntactically and semantically positive structures that comprise less than 1 percent of the data and katiyen having the meaning ‘definitely’ and (ii) 13 instances of syntactically non-negative but semantically negative structures that account for less than 1 percent of the data and katiyen being interpreted as ‘strictly’. Here it is used to modify a prohibitive predicate but does not necessarily mark the subjective certainty. I conclude that different uses of katiyen indicate significant structural, semantic and pragmatic distinctions, which is in contrast with recent claims that its pragmatic use is the same in each case.

Keywords:

Negative concord item, syntax, semantics, corpus analysis Turkish,

PDF

___

Anand, P., & Brasoveanu, A. (2010). Modal Concord as Modal Modification. In M. Prinzhorn, V. Schmitt & S. Zobel (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 14, 19- 36.
Giannakidou, A. (2000). Negative…concord? Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 18, 457-523.
Giannakidou, A. (2006). N-Words and Negative Concord. In M. Everaert & H. van Riemsdijk (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Syntax 3, 327-391. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Göksel, A., & Kerslake, C. (2005). Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. Routledge : London and New York.
Görgülü, E. (2017). Negative polarity in Turkish : from negation to nonveridicality. Macrolinguistics, 5/7, 51-69. The Learned Press.
Görgülü, E. (2020). Negative sensitive items in Turkish : Nehative polarity or negative concord? RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi, 21, 724-749.
Grosz, P. (2010). Grading Modality : A New Approach to Modal Concord and its Relatives. In M. Prinzhorn, V. Schmitt & S. Zobel (eds.), Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, 14, 185-201.
Katiyen. Nişanyan Online Dictionary. https://www.nisanyansozluk.com/kelime/katiyen (accessed on March 30th, 2023).
Kelepir, M. (2001). Topics in Turkish Syntax: Clasusal Structure and Scope. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. MIT.
Kelepir. M. (2003). Olmak, değil, var ve yok. In G. König, N. Büyükkantarcıoğlu, F. Karahan, XVI. Dilbilim Kurultayı Bildirileri, 23-24 Mayıs 2002, Ankara: Hacettepe Üniversitesi Yayınları, 70-81.
Repp, Sophie. (2013). Common ground management : modal particles, illocutionary negation and VERUM. Beyond expressives – explorations in use-conditional meaning, Current Research in Semantics / Pragmatics Interface (Vol. 28, 231-275). Leiden: Brill.
Romero, M., & Han, C. (2004). On negative yes/no questions. Linguistics an Philosophy, 27, 609-658.
Ruhi, Ş. (2002). The Modal Adverbs mutlaka and kesinlikle in the Context of Directives and Deontic Modality in Turkish. Anadolu Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 2/1, 19-38.
Sezer, T., & Sezer, B. (2013). TS Corpus : Herkes için Türkçe Derlem. Proceedings of the 27th National Linguistics Conference, Antalya: Kemer, 217-225. Watts, R. (1986). Generated or degenerate? Two forms of linguistic competence. In D. Kastovsky, A. J. Szwedek, B. Płoczińska, Jacek Fisiak (eds.). Linguistics Across Historical and Geographical Boundaries. Vol. 1, Walter de Gruyter, 157-174.
Yakut Kubaş, B. A. (2022). KATİYEN as a common modifier in Turkish. Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 7, 114-127.