Turkic verbs constitute open lexical classes. Certain nonderived stems have similar cognates in all languages of the family. Turkish examples include ‹al-› ‘to take’, ‹gör-› ‘to see’, ‹öl-› ‘to die’, ‹uyu-› ‘to sleep’, ‹ver-› ‘to give’, ‹ye-› ‘to eat’. The verbal morphology is remarkably rich and strikingly comparable.

The declinable word class traditionally called adjective (nomen adiectivum) is a major word class containing words that describe properties and qualities, answering questions such as ‘what kind (of)?’, e.g. Tofan ḳan-dị̈ɣ?. It is an open class in all Turkic languages.

Turkic word accent, which assigns prominence to certain syllables in words, consists of high pitch accent and dynamic stress accent. High pitch is defined here as high fundamental frequency, whereas dynamic stress means greater expiratory pressure or/and intensity. The accents combine in various constellations in the individual languages and interact in complex ways. Word accent patterns are central features in all Turkic grammars, but their different language-specific dimensions are still insufficiently known. Though word-level prominence and accent placement have been widely discussed, satisfactory descriptions for most Turkic systems are still lacking. The present section will mainly be based on the relatively well-known Turkish system.

Turkic participant nominals, glossed 〈pn〉, refer to participants in actions and are derived by means of specific markers. They can be used without a syntactic head, e.g. Altay käl-gän ‘who/which has come’, Turkish ‹duy|duğ|um› ‘what I hear/heard’, ‹gel|en› ‘somebody/something coming/having come’. They can also be used adnominally, as attributes in nominal phrases, e.g. Altay käl-gän kiži ‘a/the person who has come’, Turkish ‹duy|duğ|um ses› ‘a/the sound I hear/heard’, ‹gel|en posta› ‘incoming mail’. In both functions, they may function as the nucleus of a relative clause. There is no reason to assume that the headless use is diachronically secondary to the attributive use.

Turkic adverbs are single-word lexical units serving to modify verbs, verb phrases, adjectives, other adverbs, clauses, and sentences, answering questions such as ‘in what way? and ‘like what?’. They do not constitute morphologically well-defined categories and mostly originate as other parts of speech. Many are petrified case forms, participant nominals, action nominals, and converbs. Some have the same shape as secondary postpositions but differ from them by being unable to govern grammatical cases. The number of nonderived adverbs is highly limited. Turkic adverbs of different subclasses cannot be subsumed under a common semantic prototype.

This chapter will present a few examples of shared features and differences in Turkic vocabularies. It is a highly condensed survey of an almost inexhaustible topic.

This chapter will briefly deal with linguistic relations above the level of the Turkic sentence, i.e. in discourse and text constitution. Preceding chapters have demonstrated how hierarchical syntactic structures can be broken down into constituents: sentences into clauses, clauses into phrases, and phrases into words, all according to certain grammatical regularities. No corresponding regularities are found above the sentence level. Speakers and writers are relatively free to choose their own tactics in organizing utterances.

Turkic languages possess well-developed systems of distinct grammatical modalities expressed by thematic bases in main clauses. They include voluntative, optative, hypothetical, necessitative, potential, confirmative, presumptive, desiderative, and prospective bases. There are large inventories of modal operators in each language, and there is a great deal of variation within the family. Uses of the different categories frequently overlap, even within one and the same language.

This short chapter on morphology will deal with Turkic words and their internal structures. Most phenomena mentioned will be discussed more closely in the ensuing chapters.

A number of characteristics of Turkic main clauses have been discussed above. This chapter will briefly deal with structures found at sentence level. Turkic sentences express statements, questions, and commands, and display certain grammatical structures. A sentence can consist of one single clause or of several clauses with specific relations between them. The head of the sentence is a main clause predicate, which links the involved clauses together and marks the border to the following sentence in a text.

Turkic voluntatives are, like optatives, used to indicate that a given action is desirable. Unlike imperatives, they do not express direct commands to second persons, but apply to first and third persons, e.g. Turkish ‹Öl|eyi|m› ‘May I die’, ‹Öl|eli|m› ‘May we die’, ‹Öl|sün|ler› ‘May they die’. Second-person voluntatives are lacking, similar notions being expressed by the semantically close optative or aorist categories.

The aim of this brief chapter is to sketch a possible periodization of stages in the diachronic development of Turkic. This is admittedly an almost impossible task since all older stages are insufficiently known and written sources, where available, do not provide reliable information on spoken varieties. One reason for the difficulty to define crucial diachronic limits is the fact that developments in various linguistic domains, i.e. phonology, morphology, lexicon, and syntax, are not congruent, but occur at different speeds. Lack of data makes it hard to specify approximate dates for changes, i.e. the earliest and latest points in time for the emergence or disappearance of a given feature, the terminus post quem ‘the limit after which’) and the terminus ante quem ‘the limit before which’. Nonetheless, linguistic periodization is a favorite hobby of many Turcologists since it allows their imagination to fly around relatively freely.

The oldest known intraterminal base is that of the so-called aorist. This designation is potentially misleading, since the term ‹ἀόριστος› ‘indefinite’ is normally used for a particular kind of past tense in Indo-European languages. This traditional term will nonetheless be maintained here since the thematic base is indefinite in another sense. It is a specific morphological type that has changed its semantic function markedly in the course of the known Turkic linguistic history. It has mostly become strongly defocalized and modalized. With its evasive semantic profile, it cannot be defined as representing any consistent functional type. Independently of its various stages of development, it will be glossed as 〈aor〉, whereas the other intraterminal categories will be glossed as 〈intra〉.

The Turkic declinable word class noun (substantive, nomen substantivum) refers to concrete and abstract entities, i.e. humans, animals, things, and intangible phenomena such as actions, qualities, concepts, etc.

The earliest reconstructible hypothetical stage of development may have comprised the consonant segments shown in Table 18.1.

The present volume is devoted to Turkic, one of the world’s major language families. The family comprises a high number of distinct languages and varieties that display remarkable similarities and notable differences. The languages are generally considered to be genealogically related, that is, going back to a common ancestor language reconstructable as ‘Proto-Turkic’ by means of comparative methods. They may also be seen as part of a vast ‘Transeurasian’ typological continuum consisting of Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Koreanic, and Japonic. The possible genealogical relationship between the members of this grouping is highly disputed. In particular, it is unclear whether the members represent a higher line of descent, a genealogical phylum derived from some kind of ancestor traditionally called ‘Altaic’. Various proposals concerning possible deeper genealogical links have been put forward. The Turkic languages also share interesting areal properties with neighbors in the same or adjacent regions.

This chapter deals with predications realized as main clauses. A Turkic clause consists obligatorily and minimally of a predicate, which is its primary component, i.e. its structural center. If the predicate admits a first argument (first actant), the clause may exhibit a subject as a modifier of the predicate. A combination of a subject with a predicate, e.g. Turkish ‹Köpek havlıyor› ‘The dog barks’ is a ‘nexus’, a term introduced by Jespersen (1924).

The Proto-Turkic vowel segments can be tentatively postulated as in Table 17.1.