The Oxford Turkish Grammar

Book excerpt: This volume is a comprehensive grammar of the Turkish language, suitable both for students of the Turkish language and linguistic scholars. Gerjan van Schaaik draws on sound linguistic research and an extensive corpus of real-life data, alongside more than twenty years of feedback from university classrooms, to provide the most complete, up-to-date, and practically useful survey of the Turkish language ever compiled. Following an introduction that provides background information on the Turkic languages and an overview of the linguistic terminology adopted in the volume, the first part of the book explores the fundamentals of Turkish spelling and pronunciation. Parts II and III explore the noun phrase and adjuncts and modifiers, respectively, while Parts IV and V examine the verbal system and sentence structure. These first five parts together represent a valuable overview of the fundamentals of Turkish grammar. Part VI provides an account of the ways in which new words are constructed on the basis of existing material, and constitutes a bridge to the more advanced matter treated in parts VII and VIII, including relative clauses, subordination, embedded clauses, clausal complements and the finer points of the verbal system. The work will be accompanied by a companion website that will provide exercises to accompany each part.