Tense, aspect and modality in the use of the Turkish aorist

Abstract

This study is concerned with explicating various temporal, aspectual and modal phenomena involved in the use of aorist in Turkish which is referred to as a present-time denoting suffix in the grammars of the language. The starting point of the study was data analysis. The different uses of the aorist such as: expressing present, future and past time, omnitemporal and gnomic utterances, possibility, necessity and habituality have been dealt with In so doing, it has been found out that aorist is the main way t o express non-deictic propositions in Turkish. It has to be noted that, in the sepropositions, the function ofthe aorist is not one of tense. This point seems t o explain the reason why the Turkish a orist is often referred to as geniş zaman 'broad tense'. It has also been stated that the aorist does have a temporal function but only in expressing past and future. Hence, it can be referred to as a tense only in connection with past and future. One of the important functions of the aorist is to denote possibility and necessity which belong t o the modal scale. All the moda ses of the aorist is the natural outcome of its future reference. The aorist, in its habitual use represents a series of individual events which as a whole make up a state stretching back in to the past and forward in to the future. This aspectual function is the result of a structural description of the world rather than a phenomenal one. This is the main difference between the progressive and aorist in their habitual uses. The above functions of the aorist are examined both in the complex sentences within the study and i n simple sentences that are formed with semantically classified verbs such as state verbs, action verbs, etc., in which the predicate bears the aorist suffix as a separate section i n the appendix t o provide a chance of comparison. It has been put forth that the aorist does not in it self have arhetorical function. The context of utterance and its interaction with linguistic and extra linguistic factors as well as the semantics of the verbs cause the variationin meaning. As a result, it has been proposed that, contrary to the former beliefs, - ( i )r does not denote present time. Hence the thesis provides a warning against careless generalization about tense usage.