Apprehensive in Cypriot Turkish

Abstract

The paper deals with the means of expressing the apprehensive in languages of the Oghuz branch of Turkic languages using Cypriot Turkish (CT) as an example. The treatment is based on language materials which were collected by the author during field studies in Cyprus. Grammatical and lexical markers which are used by the speaker of CT to express the apprehensive are not similar to those used in Standard Turkish. The different lexical and grammatical model for expressing the apprehensive in CT is considered in previous studies as non-Turkic and contact-induced under the influence of Cypriot-Greek language. For the purpose of comparative description apprehensive creation formulas in the related Oghuz languages such as Turkmen, Azerbaijanian and Turkish will be given. Based on these morphologic-semantic analogies found it is argued that the CT apprehensive model is not necessarily a result of Turkish-Greek language contacts. Moreover, it seems that it probably existed already in the Turkic inventory of native speakers before their migration to the island after its conquest by the Ottoman Empire in 1570/1571.