Strategies to Express Time in a Tenseless Language: Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

• Main Author: Serpil Karabüklü
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: BÜTEK Boğaziçi Eğitim Turizm Teknopark Uygulama ve Dan. Hiz. San. Tic. A.Ş. 2018-07-01
• Series: Dilbilim Araştırmaları Dergisi
• Subjects: tense; Turkish Sign Language (TİD); time
• Online Access: http://dad.boun.edu.tr/download/article-file/499587

The studies on how time is expressed in TİD have different results: Gökgöz (2009) proposes that head nod is a tense morpheme while Arık (2012) and Dikyuva et al. (2015) claim that TİD is a morphologically tenseless language. This study shows that TİD is a morphologically tenseless language based on the occurrence of head nod with different verb types. It is also proposed that tense of a sentence is expressed via time adverbials and shown which syntactic positions time adverbials occur in. Lastly, timelines in TİD, which are only reported on in a few studies, are described based on the placement of time adverbials in the signing space. It is also shown that different time spans require different timelines to be used.