A Study of the Functions of Suffixes in Azeri Turkic

Document Type : Original Article

Author

Associate Professor/ Department of Persian Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Tabriz.

Abstract

Azeri Turkic is an agglutinative language. One of its dialects is widely spoken in Tabriz. The goal of this paper is to study the functions of suffixes in Tabriz dialect. In the present paper, the independence and meaningfulness of the forms are the criteria for determining the type of a form in the explanation of the morphological and syntactic functions of the simple suffixes. The result of the study shows that, in Azeri Turkic, a suffix helps a verb to change into a non-verb word and extends its own function. Moreover, a suffix helps non-verb words conjugate like verbs. This helps verbs and other words to be so various and numerous that they can express meanings, concepts, and emotions with delicate and elaborate differences. 80 suffixes out of 196 suffixes found inAzeri Turkic are simple. A word can take up to 7 suffixes. Some of the suffixes determine the morphological nature of a word and some others determine its syntactic functions. Morphological suffixes immediately follow a stem while the syntactic suffixes occur in the final position. The suffixes have different phonetic realizations on the basis of vowel harmony rules.

Keywords

References

Aronoff, M. (1994). Morphology by Itself: Stems and Inflectional Classes. (Linguistic. Inquiry Monographs 22). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Igarashi, Y. (2003). Japanese as an Altaic Language: An Investigation of Japanese Genetic Affiliation through Biological Findings. WPLC (working papers of the linguistics circle of the university of victoria, (17), pp. 35-47.
Johanson, L. (1998). The History of Turkic. in the Turkic Languages. Edited by Larse Johanson & Éva Ágnes Csató. 1st ed. pp. 81–125. London and New York: Routledge.
Menges, K. H. (1995). The Turkic Languages and Peoples: An Introduction to Turkic Studies. 2 nd ed. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.
Richards, J.C. & R. Schmidt, (2002). Longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics. 3rd ed. London: Longman.
Trask, R. L. (2015). Historical Linguistics. 3rd ed. Revised and Edited by Robert McColl Millar. London: Routledge Taylor & Francis group.
Journal of Iranian Dialects & Linguistics
Volume 5, Issue 2
April 2021
Pages 213-239

Files

History

  • Receive Date: 14 June 2020
  • Revise Date: 30 December 2020
  • Accept Date: 05 January 2021

Share

How to cite

Statistics