Minimizers in Turkish: a corpus study

Abstract

(Pre-publication version) This paper is concerned with minimizers as a subclass of negative polarity items (NPIs henceforth) and their distributional and semantic properties in Turkish. Even though various characteristics of NPIs like ‘hiç’ never/ever, ‘kimse’ anyone and ‘katiyyen’ in any way were analyzed by different researchers such as Zidani-Eroğlu (1997ab), Besler (2000), Kelepir (2001), Yanılmaz (2009) and Görgülü (2017), the nature of minimizers as a subtype of NPIs have never been investigated. In this work, based on an online corpus study as well as an online Google and Twitter search, I first present an overview of various groups of minimizers in Turkish. After that, I investigate their distributional properties and compare their behavior to that of other NPIs in the language. The results show that an overwhelming majority of minimizers appear in syntactically and semantically negative contexts. The findings also demonstrate that minimizers can occur in conditional clauses as well. This is an important finding since conditionals are contexts where other NPIs have been claimed in previous work to not actually appear. Another result is that minimizers can also appear in yes/no questions even though this constitutes a very small sample of the data. Finally, it is proposed that these characteristics of minimizers can be accounted for by assuming that minimizers are allowed to appear only in nonveridical contexts (Zwarts, 1995; Giannakidou, 2002, 2007, 2011). These are the contexts where the truth condition of the proposition is not entailed or guaranteed.