Tane as a marker of discreteness in Turkish

Abstract

The word tane in Turkish has been investigated in various ways by different researchers over the past a few decades and there have been a number of different analyses about what it actually is and what it does in the structure. In this work, I will review some of the prominent descriptive and theoretical accounts proposed by those such as Lewis (1975), Underhill (1976), Skilliter (1986), Schroeder (1999), Öztürk (2005), Göksel and Gerslake (2005) and Sağ (2019, 2021), among others. Based on a new corpus analysis on the uses of tane in the language, I will argue that it is not functioning as an optional classifier and also not a semantic marker that is an overt realization of an otherwise covert cardinal head, as has been proposed in recent theoretical analyses. Instead, I will show that tane should be considered to be a pragmatic marker rather than a semantic one. More specifically, tane appear within the numeral construction when the referent, whether it is singular or plural, needs to be marked as discrete in the context. This way various uses of it can be uniformly captured in the language. The structure of this paper is as follows: in the next section, I provide an overview of various accounts that deal with the nature of tane and its use in Turkish. This section also includes various counterarguments that show that the existing analyses do not fully capture its true behavior. In the section following, based on a corpus work, I propose my own account and argue that tane is functioning as a marker of discreteness. In other words, the various uses of tane can be uniformly captured as marking discrete entities or individuals. The final section is the conclusion of the paper where I also make certain suggestions for remaining work. --from introduction

In this work, I will review some of the prominent descriptive and theoretical accounts of the use of the lexical item tane in Turkish. Based on a new corpus analysis on the various uses of tane, it will be argued that it should be regarded as a pragmatic marker rather than a semantic one. More specifically, tane appears within the numeral construction when the referent needs to be marked as a discrete entity in the context. This account captures the different uses of the word in a systematic way in the language. -- From author