Temporal clauses in Turkish Sign Language

Abstract

This dissertation aims to investigate the typological, structural, and semantic properties of temporal clauses in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). It is shown in this thesis that temporal clauses that denote sequentiality, simultaneity, duration, and frequency are attested in TİD. Some of these are headed by postpositional subordinators AFTER, BEFORE, DURATION, and GÖRE. Syntactically, temporal clauses must occur in the pre-verbal area, i.e. either to the left of the matrix clause or between the matrix subject and the matrix verb. They also display characteristics of subordinated clauses: They form constituents with the postpositional subordinators and they are usually marked by a non-manual marker, head thrust, which functions as a clausal boundary marker in TİD. The presence of semantically vacuous negation in BEFORE-clauses also provides evidence for subordination. Moreover, temporal clauses in TİD provide visible evidence for a number of abstract semantic notions proposed previously: (i) temporal and matrix clauses as Ground and Figure (Talmy, 1975), (ii) spatiotemporality, i.e. topographic relations between temporal arguments (Demirdache and Uribe-Extebarria, 1997), (iii) properties of durational and locating temporal markers, and (iv) loci as temporal variables. Regarding the last topic, this thesis extends Schlenker’s (2013, 2017) analysis of loci as temporal variables to a complex sign -DURATION- in which {duration} is the bound root and temporal pronouns attach to this root in the form of clitics. Finally, a new timeline which has not been observed in any other sign language before is proposed.