Aspect: aspect
Aspect is a feature that specifies duration of the action in time, whether the action has been completed, ongoing etc.
In Turkish a set of verbal morphemes alter the Aspect feature of a verb.
These morphemes often affect the Tense and Mood features as well.
The mapping between the suffixes and the Aspect values may sometimes be non-trivial.
The following describes the values used for Aspect together with the
suffixes typically introduce the defined Aspect value.
See tr-overview/special-syntax for the discussion of mapping
relevant verbal suffixes to Tense, Aspect and Mood values.
Imp: imperfect aspect
The action took / takes / will take some time span and there is no information whether and when it was / will be completed.
Examples
- yere gitmeyeceğim “I won’t go anywhere”
Perf: perfect aspect
The action has been / will have been completed.
Examples
- eve gitti ‘she went home’
- eve gitmiş ‘she apparently went home’
- eve gidecek ‘she will go home’
- eve gitmişti ‘she had gone home (when I arrived)’
Prog: progressive aspect
Action is in progress with respect to current or a reference time.
Turkish has two progressive markers, -(I)yor and -mAktA.
Latter is used in more formal cases than former.
Otherwise there is no clear distinction between the two.
In some contexts, both suffixes may also indicate habitual aspect (Aspect=Hab described below).
Examples
- eve gidiyor ‘she is going home (now)’
- eve gitmekte ‘she is going home (now)’
- eve gidiyordu ‘she was going home (when I saw her)’
- eve gimekteydi ‘she was going home (when I saw her)’
Hab: habitual aspect (new proposal)
Verbal morphology in Turkish may indicate an action that happens repeatedly at present or past. This aspect is mainly marked with suffix -A/Ir. In some cases, the progressive suffix -(I)yor may indicate the habitual aspect, Her sabah 5 km koşuyorum “I ran 5 km every morning”. See Göksel and Kerslake (2005, pp289–290) for details.
Examples
- çok kitap okur ‘she reads lots of books’
- sigara içerdi ‘she used to smoke’
Rapid: rapid sudden action (new proposal)
A particular verb form formed by suffix -Iver refers to actions that are sudden or performed rapidly. Kornfilt (1995, p.361) calls this rapid or sudden aspect.
Examples
- eve gidiver ‘quickly go home!’
- eve gidiverdi ‘she immediately/suddenly went home!’
Dur: durative aspect (new proposal)
A situation or action that has persisted over a period of time and still continues. This is called durative action (e.g., Kornfilt 1995, p.362). The suffixes -Akal, -Agel and -Adur indicate this aspect (the first one might better be defined as ‘durative stative’ and others ‘durative progressive’).
Examples
- bakakaldı ‘she looked (for a while, she was frozen while looking)’
- yapagelmiştir ‘she have gone on doing (something)’
- okuyadur ‘go on reading’
Prosp: prospective aspect
The action is/was about to happen.
In Turkish, combination of feature tense marker -AcAk and the past tense marker -DI signal an event that was about to happen. Another (rather rare) means of expressing prospective aspect is with the suffix -Ayaz. This form is used only in a few fixed expressions, and it only combines with the past tense forms.
Examples
- düşecekti ‘she was about to fall’
- düşeyazdı ‘she was about to fall’
References
- Aslı Göksel and Celia Kerslake. Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge, 2005.
- Jaklin Kornfilt. Turkish. London and New York: Routledge, 1997.
Aspect in other languages: [arr] [bej] [bg] [bm] [bor] [cs] [el] [eme] [ga] [gn] [gub] [ha] [hu] [hy] [hyw] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [la] [mdf] [myu] [myv] [nci] [pcm] [ps] [qpm] [ru] [say] [sl] [tpn] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl] [yrl]