The Derivational Functions of Suffix +lA From a Diachronic Perspective

Like many other languages in the world, Turkish is rich in terms of linguistic elements, including noun and verb roots, derivative noun and verb stem types, and affixes, which result in its classification as a flexional language. The fact that the number of lexemes in its vocabulary is high and diverse in type is closely related to both its historical development in dialectal variations since the Old Turkish period and the word-formation techniques it possesses, thereby enhancing its capacity to produce various parts of speech. Generally, in natural languages, in addition to many words that directly correspond to a concept that has a meaning in its bare and root form, sounds and sound groups in the morphemic level do not make sense on their own and do not semantically represent a concept. However, they are operational, and they attribute a meaning when they are affixed. As is the case in many other languages, these morphemic units are generally used being influenced by syntactic facts to establish semantic connections between words. These morphemic units do not have a semantic function on their own in Turkish. They are responsible for providing meaning to a root or meaning diversity in a lexeme. This results from the agglutinative character of Turkish, but there is also another, but not prevalent, way of adding an affix to the beginning of the root. This kind of affixation in Turkish is due to the influence of the Persian language, especially during the Karahanid Turkish period, whose linguistic influence was marked in Turkish for a while. The study aims to attend to the historical developments in the linguistic qualities of the suffix +IA, one of the most prevalent and oldest suffixes in Turkish since the Oldest Turkic dialects through multiple layers of linguistic fields such as syntax, semantics, and morphology. Thus, different from other studies about the qualities of the suffix, the study attempts to handle it in terms of both grammatical and linguistic aspects simultaneously.