Conveyance of feature gradation semantics in modern Turkish

Abstract

The aim of the article is to study the Turkish adjective from the point of view of a complex and systematic description of the means that serve to indicate the semantics of feature gradation. Having analyzed the works of Ukrainian Turkologists and representatives of various grammar schools in Turkey and in European countries, which focus on the adjective, we determined that most of them study certain features of the adjective structure or functioning in modern Turkish. Besides, means of denoting the feature manifestation intensity, particularly those having diminutive semantics, especially word-forming affixes that realize this meaning, also became the subject of the scientists’ research. At the same time, we did not record any work that deals with a holistic
description of linguistic (grammatical, word-forming) means as a system that serves to denote the semantics of feature gradation, which determines the relevance of our research. In the present work, we set the task to carry out such a systematic description of these means and determine the features of their interaction within this system. Along with this, the paper discusses the general problems of qualification of the adjective as part of speech in the Turkish language and differentiation of its lexical and semantic classes. Within the framework of the study, we offer the description of the degrees of comparison of adjectives, the intensive adjective forms, the polyfunctional affix -ca/-ce, the word-forming affixes with diminutive and augmentative semantics as well as the pair words (lexical repetitions) and syntactic models of the implementation of feature gradation semantics. The methodological prerequisite of the study is the functional and semantic approach.