This study investigates the phonological and morphological adaptation of Turkish loanwords of Arabic origin to reveal aspects of native speakers’ knowledge that are not necessarily obvious. It accounts for numerous modification processes that these loanwords undergo when borrowed into Turkish. To achieve this, a corpus of 250 Turkish loanwords was collected and analyzed whereby these loanwords were compared to their Arabic counterparts to reveal phonological processes that Turkish followed to adapt them. Also, it tackles the treatment of morphological markings and compound forms in Turkish loanwords. The results show that adaptation processes are mostly phonological, albeit informed by phonetics and other linguistic factors. It is shown that the adaptation processes are geared towards unmarkedness in that faithfulness to the source input—Arabic—is violated, taking the burden to satisfy Turkish phonological constraints. Turkish loanwords of Arabic origin undergo a number of phonological processes, e.g., substitution, deletion, degemination, vowel harmony, and epenthesis for the purpose of repairing the ill-formedness. The Arabic feminine singular and plural morphemes are treated as part of the root, with fossilized functions of such markers. Also, compound forms are fused and word class is changed to fit the syntactic structure of Turkish. Such loanwords help pave the way to invoke latent native Turkish linguistic constraints.
This research paper investigates the word gid which is used in Najdi Arabic, a dialect spoken in Najd region in Arabic peninsula. This particle is analyzed syntactically using the recent assumptions of the minimalist program (Chomsky 1993, 1995, and subsequent work). As for the findings, it turns out that gid functions as a head that instantiates its maximal projection above TP and under CP. So, this word is not a property of TP domain nor a CP domain. Due to the fact that this word is only used when a speaker is certain of the propositional content of his/her utterance, we argue that gid is an evidential head that scopes over the tense layer. Furthermore, we argue that gid has an EPP feature, hence the specifier position of the functional phases headed by it must be filled by some element which is the subject. This accounts for the fact that subject must precede gid in declarative sentences. Additionally, gid has [PAST] feature which is uninterpretable and hence must be deleted before the derivation is handed over to the LF following the general lines of feature deletion of Chomsky (1995 and 2005). We argue that the deletion of [PAST] feature is conducted through an Agree operation that is established between gid and the verb. This is why gid comes exclusively with past tense. Otherwise [PAST] feature on gid remains active, leading to the ungrammaticality of the given sentence.
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