Typology of Assertive Sentences in Modern Turkic Languages

Abstract

In this article, assertive sentences in modern Turkic languages are described synchronically in terms of their morphosyntactic structures, syntactic and semantic functions, and typological characteristics. Here, the term assertive sentence is used to refer to a construction that expresses the speaker’s strong claim regarding a proposition and their belief in its truth. Such constructions are encoded in modern Turkic languages through finite suffixes (e.g., Tuv. -ÇIK), copular particles (e.g., Tuv. iyik), and sentence adverbials (TT gerçekten ‘really’, Tat. barıber ‘already’, Uzb. aslida ‘actually’, Kaz. ärine ‘of course’, Tuv. ıynaan ‘of course’). Assertive sentences, which fall within the category of modality, are examined in this study solely on the basis of affirmative main clauses. Other assertive structures (interrogative sentences, negative sentences, subordinate clauses, etc.) are not addressed here, as they are the subject of a separate study. The study primarily evaluates examples drawn from modern Turkic languages such as Tuvan, Khakas, Yakut, Turkish, Turkmen, Uzbek, Tatar, and Kazakh. In this way, many Turkic languages belonging to different branches of the Turkic language family (the Oghuz, Kipchak, Siberian, and Karluk branches) are taken into consideration. The aim of this study is to identify the strategies for constructing assertive sentences in modern Turkic languages, to outline the typology of these strategies, to compare these constructions from syntactic and semantic perspectives, and to propose a new distribution of modern Turkic languages based on assertive structures.