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Syntax In Syntax

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In view of morphology and syntax in linguistics, “questions are indicated by a number of interrogative constructions and by sentence-final particles” (Matthews & Yip, 2011, p. 359). The languages of Turkish and Cantonese will be investigated and compared in terms of forming “yes/no questions”, “alternative questions” and “wh-questions”.
Knowing that Turkish is a synthetic language (Denham & Lobeck, 2013), the most significant rule in question formation is to embed an auxiliary verb “mi”, which is an interrogative particle, after or within a question attaching to or before the predicate (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005; Lewis, 1967). For example, “Zehra Londra-ya eylül-de mi gid-ecek?” is a direct yes/no question which lexically refers to “Zehra London-dative September-locative interrogative …show more content…
They illustrated it with “Cemal okula git-ti mi, (yoksa) git-me-di mi?” which lexically refers to “Cemal school-dative go-perfective interrogative (or) go-negative-perfective interrogative” meaning that “Did Cemal go to school or not?” (p. 291). They noted that “mi” can annex to subjects, objects and adverbials but in a noun phrase, it must annex to its head.
Moreover, the pronoun of wh-interrogatives, such as “ne” means “what” and “kaç” means “how many”, can associate with all the inflectional suffixes that append to nouns placing immediately before the predicate (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005; Lewis, 1967). For instance, “Parti-de kim-ler var-dı?” which lexically refers to “party-locative who-plural existent-past copula” meaning that “Who was there at the party?” (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005, p. 304).
In short, looking into the examples of question constructions, it is revealed that Turkish is an agglutinative language with a base order of “Subject-Object-Verb” related to the movement of topicalization (Denham & Lobeck,

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