Turkish Syntax
This semester I have been taking an introduction to syntax class and one of the topics we covered is head position in phrase structures (as a side note: I almost certainly am using some of the terminology wrong here). English is a (generally) head-initial language. Essentially, in English, phrases tend to follow a structure with a head followed by its complement. Prepositional phrases are just that, prepositional, with the head (a preposition) before the rest of the phrase. Similarly, in verb phrases verbs precede their complements (i.e. grammatical objects). This compares with Turkish which is head-final (at least in the cases that I know of). Turkish lacks prepositions, but certain noun cases and suffixes act similarly to prepositions and provide the same information that would be given in English through prepositions, thus making the suffixes postpositions since they follow the noun phrase. Similarly, the order of verbs and objects are flipped with Turkish having a SOV word order (compared with English’s SVO word order). Since my knowledge of syntax is not particularly deep, nor is my knowledge of Turkish, I wish I could explore this further, but I think Turkish’s head-final nature and knowing how this compares with English and others languages I’ve studied will be an important piece of information to have in the future and will be helpful for categorizing and explaining bits of Turkish grammar.
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