Diachrony of morphology in Carriols

The evolution of negation is typically characterized as a cyclical process; whereby new constructions emerge to encode existing functions.The Negative Existential Cycle (NEC) was originally proposed by Croft (1991) and subsequently developed by Veselinova (2013Veselinova ( , 2014)).An examination of the characteristics of the Croft's Cycle has been conducted in predominantly spoken languages.Consequently, the inquiries posed in relation to the NEC will facilitate a more profound comprehension of the sources and pathways of verbal negation in the domain of signed modality.Despite the numerous studies on standard negation in Turkish Sign Language (TD) (see Zeshan 2006; Gkgz 2009 Gkgz , 2011;; Pfau 2016; Makarolu 2021), there is a paucity of research on existential negation.The present study undertakes an investigation into the evolution of negative existential negator YOK 'not.exist' in TD and it seeks to investigate the applicability of the Negative Existential Cycle as proposed by Croft (1991) and examines the potential of it as an explanatory framework in understanding the sources and pathways of standard negation.A hypothesis can be advanced that TD may be considered as a language situated at Stage B of the NEC.This is due to the fact that it has discrete negative markers that are used for verbal negation and for the negation of existential clauses.However, as evidenced by the corpus data, TD exhibits negative existential marker YOK which developed into the encoding of standard/verbal negation as illustrated in (1) and ( 2).(1)3SENT.LETTER1 YOK PT1:PRO1