No abstract

The current study investigates Turkish politicians' code mixing in their public speeches and the variation among the speakers as well as the historical and linguistic factors influencing this variation. It is hypothesized that the variation either consciously or unconsciously outlines the identity of the speaker in the direction that s/he wants to be identified by their audience. The findings are interpreted with reference to the language reform (a linguistic change during the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic) that Turkish language went through in 1928.

We provide a sketch grammar of a new bilingual mixed language based on data gathered through interaction with its last native speakers. The language, which we call Posha of Çankırı, is spoken in central Turkey. The source languages are Turkish and Lomavren, another bilingual mixed language for which the source languages are Armenian and some Central Indo-Aryan varieties. In Posha of Çankırı, the mixing happens in the nominal morphology and in the lexicon while the verbal roots and verbal morphology are entirely from the ancestral language, Lomavren, albeit with certain minor changes. The Indo-Aryan layer of vocabulary is rather thin and the Indo-Aryan retentions in grammar can only be speculated. We show that the emergence of Posha of Çankırı has been initiated by language shift, but that its ultimate defining characteristic is L2 insertions into (some distorted version of) the L1. The study contributes to the documentation of lesser known new varieties and touches upon topics such as the mechanism involved in the emergence of bilingual mixed languages.

In the evidential system of Uzbek, the speaker has different grammatical options in marking the source of information, such as -ibdi, ekan, emish, etc., although it is not compulsory to mark this category in the utterance. In addition to these established markers, new markers have developed into evidentials, and they encode specific sub-categories of evidentiality. In this study, after a brief overview of grammatical markers of evidentiality in Uzbek, the marker chog‘i is examined with a syntactic and semantic approach based on a corpus of selected texts. Its development into an inferential marker is evaluated with special attention to sources of evidentials.

This paper investigates the inferentials shekilli and -(i)bdi in a written corpus of modern Uzbek with consideration of native speakers’ opinions on the interpretation of specific uses of these items. As a result of the analysis, these inferentials are used to distinguish synchronic or a priori evidence and a posteriori evidence respectively in the Uzbek evidential system. Although both inferentials have developed from markers encodingobservable evidence that is related to a propositional event, the characteristics of the evidence forming the basis of the proposition differ. While -(i)bdi encodes inference based on traces that are interpreted as a posteriori evidence, which remains after the actualization of the event, shekilli is used for propositions based on signs that are synchronically present, or a priori evidence in cases without clear evidence at the time of speaking. Based on these two types of indirect evidence, speakers can mark synchronic and retrospective inferences in the Uzbek language with these two inferentials. Considering the evidential system in Turkic languages, Uzbek, which is considered the continuation of Chagatay, has a relatively rich evidential system that includes different markers with specific semantic tasks. Furthermore, this research shows that in Uzbek’s comprehensive evidential system, copying items can also develop as evidential in addition to evidentials of Turkic origin.