Tense: tense
Turkish has a complex tense/aspect/modality system.
Turkish verbs can indicate actions in the present, past or future. Complex tenses for actions that happened before, during, or after a past event can also be specified by suffixation. The actions that happen before, during, or after a future event are expressed using an auxiliary.
The verbs expressing actions that happened before a reference in the past are marked with value Pqp.
For events that happen during the past reference, we use Tense=Past with proper progressive (Prog) or habitual (Hab) Aspect.
Past: past tense
Turkish past tense is realized with -DI or -mIş suffixes on verbal predicates, and with -(y)DI and -(y)mIş suffixes on nominal predicates.
The difference between the -DI and -mIş forms are related to evidentiality (Evident) rather than Tense. Both morphemes refer to a (completed) past event.
These suffixes also combine with others to refer to time relative to a past event, which will be discussed below.
Examples
- eve gitti ‘she went home’
- eve gitmiş ‘she went home’ (evidential: speaker does not have direct information on the event)
- eve gitmeliydi ‘she should have gone home’
- eve gitseydi ‘if she went home’
- hastaydı ‘she was sick’
- hastaymış ‘she was sick’ (evidential)
Fut: future tense
Turkish future tense is expressed with suffix -(y)AcAk.
Copular predicates cannot directly take future Tense morphemes.
Future tense in nominal phrases are expressed using auxiliary ol-.
Examples
- eve gidecek ‘she will go home’
Pres: present tense
The present tense in Turkish is realized by lack of past or future morphemes.
Examples
- eve gidiyor ‘she is going home’
- eve gitmeli ‘she should go home’
- eve gider ‘she goes home’
The differences between these forms are Aspect and Mood differences.
Pqp: pluperfect
This denotes an action that happened before a reference time in the past.
In Turkish, this is realized by combination of -DI/-mIş and -(y)DI/-(y)mIş (only three combinations exemplified below possible).
As in future tense, nominal predicates require the auxiliary ol- for this tense (hasta olmuştu ‘she had been sick’).
Hence, we only mark verbal predicates with double past indicators as Pqp.
Examples
- eve gitmişti ‘she had gone home’ (this is not evidential)
- eve gitmişmiş ‘she had gone home’ (this is evidential)
- eve gittiydi ‘she had gone home’ (colloquial)
Tense in other languages: [ab] [abq] [aqz] [arr] [bej] [bg] [bm] [cs] [cy] [el] [en] [es] [fi] [fr] [ga] [gn] [gub] [ha] [hu] [hy] [it] [jaa] [ka] [ky] [pcm] [ps] [qpm] [ru] [sah] [say] [sl] [sv] [tr] [tt] [u] [uk] [urb] [urj] [xcl]