Book Description

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of linguistic studies on space in Turkish. Considering that such a fundamental semantic category is ripe for further research and acknowledging that such processes may be challenging, any shortcomings in this book can be more comfortably evaluated within scientific tolerance. Whether this book, which is neither the first nor the last research on space in Turkish, is of high quality will be determined over time; however, it can be said with humility and ease of mind that it is a modest start in its field. A research book should be original, and the researcher should discover something others have yet to say (Eco, 2018). From a dialectical perspective, every scientific research must benefit from previously drawn roadmaps. This book frequently refers to previous roadmaps to gain a broad perspective, deep conceptual framework, and consistent methodology required to achieve original research quality and contribute to the field in the analysis of spatial language in Turkish. Space is a semantic concept that includes the locations and motions of entities in space and the human being as an observer. Spatial language, the study area of spatial semantics, contains spatial expressions, which are the conventional specifications of the location or translocation of a particular entity. Metaphors or conversational implicatures do not count as spatial expressions. Spatial frames of reference, deixis, topology, toponymy, motion and lexia concepts are at the centre of spatial expressions based on figure and ground relations. In many Turkish sources that use prescriptive grammar methods, the place given to the subject of space is limited. The number of linguistic studies on spatial language in Turkish is also low. This book aims to explain the stages, levels, and tools used to code spatial knowledge as a linguistic category in Turkish. For this purpose, the bracketing method listed and analysed spatial expressions. It has been determined that the elements that become “location” in the static spatial relationship are usually formed with /+DA/, /+DAki/, and /+ki/ morphemes. The elements that become “goal”, “source”, and “route” in a dynamic spatial relationship are usually formed with /+A/, /+DAn/ and /+I/ morphemes.The noun phrase-based ground coding strategy is dominant in Turkish. The spatial relationship is established with the case category and word types (spatial nominals, postpositions, adverbs, and verbs), word groups (noun phrases and adjective phrases), and spatial texts larger than sentences. Spatial nominals can be phrased with case suffixes, possessive suffixes, and postpositions. Spatial information is not only from words, phrases or sentences but more intensively and accurately extracted from spatial lexias. For this reason, in linguistic studies on spatial language, attention should be paid to the pragmatic context of communication and the text-linguistic references in utterances. This book was produced from a part of the doctoral dissertation titled “Spatial Language in Yaşar Kemal’s The Wind from the Plain Trilogy”, prepared in 2023 at Uşak University, Graduate Education Institute, Modern Turkish Language Branch.