Formal and Semantic Hierarchy of Turkish Transitive Verbs

Abstract

In Turkish, transitivity is defined according to both syntactic and semantic criteria. Although transitivity is determined by semantic and syntactic criteria, mostly contradictory verb and sentence types are considered transitive. A verb or sentence that meets the semantic conditions sometimes fails to meet the syntactic conditions, and a verb or sentence that fulfills the syntactic conditions sometimes fails to meet the semantic conditions. There are two reasons for this contradiction. The first is that transitivity is based on strict syntactic conditions and does not take into account verb meaning coding frames outside the [NOM-ACC] case-frame in which prototypical transitivity is encoded. The second is that transitivity is restricted to prototype transitivity as a semantic concept. However, transitivity is a gradual and multifactorial concept consisting of different phases. For this reason, it is not possible to accept that there is only one transitive, therefore only one type of verb meaning and only one case-frame in which the transitivity is encoded. There are different degrees of transitivity, and the verb classes are ranked on the scale of transitivity from high or prototypical transitive to low transitive. The degrees of transitivity in Turkish are coded to some extent formally with different case-frames. In this study, it has been investigated which verb types the transitivity scale involves in Turkish and to what extent different degrees of transitivity can be coded with different case-frames. Based on semantic and syntactic parameters, Turkish transitivity scale and semantic map of transitive verb classes were created.