Abstract
AN EXAMPLE OF GRAMMATICALISATION SEEN IN OLD ANATOLIAN TURKISH: “VARDI”
The feature of language being a living entity stems from the fact that it is in a constant change and transformation. Changes and transformations seen in languages mostly occur naturally and are carried out spontaneously by the speakers of the language. The Turkish language, which is accepted as one of the oldest languages in the world, has undergone many changes in terms of lexical, morphological, phonetic and semantic from the very beginning. While the size of these changes is sometimes at the level of dialect differences, sometimes it can be at a level that makes it difficult for even communities speaking the same language to agree. Especially in languages used in very large geographies such as Turkish, these differences may increase. This situation can sometimes cause phonetic and semantic differences in glossemes to gain unrecognized and incomprehensible forms by different dialect speakers. Sometimes, even if phonetic differences allow linguistic structures to be known, functional or semantic differences may not make agreement possible. Changes in languages, whose main function is to provide communication between people, can be versatile. One of these changes is grammaticalization. In this article, the structure of "vardı" used in the task of connecting preposition (conjunction) by being grammatical in Old Anatolian Turkish is discussed and the new function of the structure is evaluated.
Keywords
Turkish, Old Anatolian Turkish, grammaticalisation, preposition, vardı conjunction.
