Reported Discourse Constructions in Chagatay and Ottoman

This article investigates the use of reported discourse constructions in Nevâyî’s Tevârîhi Mülûk-i Acem, a Chagatay text from the late 15th century, and in its Ottoman Turkish translation from the 16th century. Reported discourse (RD) refers to spoken or mental text that is inserted as a quoted utterance within a larger speech using quotative indexes. Quotative indexes serve as formal signals of reported discourse, marking the quotation and separating it from the surrounding text, thus drawing the reader’s attention to the presence of a quote. RD constructions are considered to be a type of semanto-syntactic expression rather than a syntagmatic class. The aim of this paper is to establish typological inventories of RD constructions by providing illustrative examples of each type and comparing them in two parallel texts representing two different varieties of historical Turkic. To contribute to the relatively less studied topic of Turkic syntax, I present data from 15th- and 16th-century classical Turkic written languages comparatively and typologically, encoding the various RD constructions into abstract structural types in the selected texts. The verb de- “to say” is a specific type of verb that functions as a quotative verb in direct RD constructions across the entire Turkic language family

Linguistics · History · Islamic Thought and Society Studies · Linguistics and Cultural Studies · Philosophy · Turkish Literature and Culture