A semantic description of Turkish conditional sentences

Abstract

This thesis aims to provide a semantic description for the conditional statements in Turkish by mainly focusing on the interpretations of three different morphemes: namely the aorist, the conditional, and the past markers. Although Göksel and Kerslake (2005) briefly describe how the interpretation of conditional constructions may be affected by these markers, there has not been any detailed study on their semantic contributions. Therefore, I offer a semi-formal explanation for their interpretations in the context of conditionals here. Firstly, for the aorist marker occurring at the antecedent, I propose that it can shift the time of the modal operator in the conditional statement from the time of utterance to the future. However, if it chooses its characterizing reading instead of the future-oriented one, then it functions as an operator quantifying over situations. Secondly, with respect to the conditional morpheme, I argue that there are two separate markers with distinct meaning contributions. I claim that the indicative conditional marker -(y)sA assigns “epistemically possible” presupposition both for its antecedent and consequent clauses whereas the subjunctive -sA additionally brings in a certain “likelihood” presupposition for the antecedent. Lastly, concerning the past marker, I agree with the idea that it keeps its temporal meaning in both types of conditionals. Nevertheless, I suggest that it is interpreted as the modal time of the conditional statement when it is used with the subjunctive conditional marker and the conditional sentence holds no presuppositions in this context. As a result, due to the scalar competition between the past subjunctive and its indicative counterpart, the counterfactuality implicature arises for the past subjunctive conditional construction.