On the Indefinite Adjective Category in Turkish Grammar Resources: Adjective or Determiner?

Abstract

In the classification of parts of speech, some criteria are used depending on the morphological, syntactic, and semantic features of the words. Although for some words and in some languages these distinctions are not always clear, there are universally accepted criteria for distinction of adjectives. The criteria that define a lexical category and distinguish it from other categories should also be valid for all subcategories of the relevant category. From this perspective, it is seen that indefinite adjectives, which are classified as a subtype of adjectives in Turkish grammar resources, do not have the basic features that characterize adjectives. In this study, it is shown through distinctive features and criteria that the words classified as indefinite adjectives belong to a functional category called determiners in linguistics. Determiners constitute a grammatical and semantic category necessary for nouns, which are lexical units, to be able to refer to a real entity in the world at the sentence level. Sentences, basic constituents of which are subject and predicate, are formed by assigning a feature referred to by the predicate to the entity referred to by the subject. At this point, determiners have the function of determining which entities, and to what extent, are included in the set of properties denoted by the predicate. Words such as bütün, her, her bir, bazı, hiçbir, çoğu in Turkish are words that fulfill this obligatory determining function of natural languages. Determiners are not limited to these types of words; different lexical units and structural features can also fulfill this function.