An Attempt at Outlining the Major Features of Compositional Aspect in Modern Turkish

In Turkology, the aspectual status of verb forms is understudied, as are, especially, the compositional means of realizing aspect distinctions. Difficulties arise from specificities of the Turkish language such as its agglutinative nature, lack of articles, the relatively free word order. The verb has a complex paradigm whereby certain forms have tense meanings, some aspectual but the root morpheme itself is neutral vis-à-vis aspect. This paper employs Verkuyl’s two aspect schemata – perfective and imperfective, as an analytical tool, and when these schemata and the compositional aspect theory in general are applied to Turkish, many intriguing questions arise, for example: how does the preterit realize the perfective-imperfective contrast? How is aspect expressed in both the past domain and outside it? How will accusative forms, that are definite, be realized in subjects, indirect objects and adverbial nominals from the point of view of the compositional aspect theory? The paper is a broad initial attempt for preliminary answers to these and similar complex issues. The main generalizations are that the compositional realization of aspect in Modern Turkish is located at the sentence-level and that it takes place predominantly through the definite-indefinite contrast in direct objects, through case values and word order patterns according to the functional sentence perspective, as well as through various other means that are subject to future in-depth research. Keywords: Modern Turkish; Turkish aspect; compositional aspect; perfectivity-imperfectivity contrast