Squatitive negation in Turkish
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Date
2023
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Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2023.
Abstract
This thesis examines the squatitive negation forms (Horn, 2001) in Turkish in order to provide a linguistic description and an explanation of their discourse functions. Squatitives are negation forms that are non-canonical with distinctive interactional properties. Turkish has three grammatical negation forms: i. substantive predicate ‘değil’, ii. verbal suffix ‘/-mA/’, iii. existential predicate ‘yok’. Given the existence of these exhaustively productive negation forms, why there is a need for another form of negation is a question that has to be discussed. The answer lies in the interactional nature of language. Squatitive negation forms typically include a taboo or swear word such as nah and b*k inserted into a sentence and this taboo word changes the polarity of the sentence. Structurally, squatitives display certain constraints: i. they cannot be embedded, ii. they cannot occur in questions, and iii. they cannot license NPIs, which raises questions about their status as polarity items.Interactionally, squatitives require an antecedent utterance (usually by another speaker) which they repeat and change its polarity. While doing that, they function to display the speaker’s stance with purposes such as challenging or refuting the interlocutor’s preceding utterance. Following Berman’s (2005) discourse stance framework, I claim that squatitive forms most frequently mark attitude stance, in particular, affective stance based on 84 tokens collected from Turkish National Corpus and TS Corpus.