On the true nature of ÇOKTAN in Turkish

Abstract

Turkish has the temporal adverb çoktan ‘long time ago’ that has been treated as a positive polarity item (PPI) in recent studies. It has been argued that it cannot co-occur with clause-mate negation, whereas native speakers seem to have split it into two in terms of its grammaticality with long-distance negation. Interestingly, there seems to be almost no formal study that has ever analyzed the properties of Turkish PPIs. In this paper, the objective was to carry out a corpus analysis of çoktan and find out whether it is truly an item of positive polarity. Based on new corpus data, it is shown that çoktan is indeed an element of positive polarity that predominantly occurs in positive sentences. It is also argued that its overall behavior can be captured by way of the semantic notion of (non)-veridicality since its syntactic distribution includes veridical and certain non-veridical contexts but excludes antiveridical ones.