SOME LIMITATIONS ON THE CONTROLLABILITY OF THE REFERENT IN TURKISH DEMONSTRATIVES / TÜRKÇE İŞARET SÖZCÜKLERİNDE GÖNDERGENİN KONTROL EDİLEBİLİRLİĞİ ÜZERİNDEKİ BAZI KISITLAMALAR

Öz

More recent linguistic works on Turkish demonstratives have turned their attention to the concept of controllability which is one of the pragmatico-semantic parameters and which conditions the occurrence of the text-dependent (non-anaphoric) usages of bu and o in the verbal text. In this study, it is shown that Turkish has a phenomenon which cannot be purely explained in terms of this concept, and it is argued that (i) there are some limiting conditions determining the distribution of the non-anaphoric demonstratives other than this parameter in Turkish demonstrative use, (ii) the interchangeability between the antecedent noun and the co-referential noun is one of the crucial factors that are operative in the selection of the appropriate usages of the non-anaphoric bu and o, (iii) on the situation where the intended referent is within the controllable domain of the speaker, ‘bu’ is used to refer to it if the co-referential noun semantically contains the antecedent noun, and ‘o’ is used to refer to it if the antecedent noun contains the co-referential noun, (iv) on the situation where the referent is not within the controllable domain of the speaker, ‘o’ refers to it regardless of whether the co-referential noun semantically contains the antecedent noun or not, (v) time is a secondary factor conditioning whether the intended referent is within the controllable domain of the speaker or not.