Morphosyntactic Analysis of Cypriot Turkish-English Codeswitching: Agglutination of Embedded Lexemes and Bilingual Periphrastic VP Creations

This study examines the agglutination and periphrasis patterns within bilingual NP and VP’s when codeswitching between the typologically agglutinative Cypriot Turkish and synthetic English. I focus on English embeddings into the understudied Cypriot dialect of Turkish, which has coexisted with Greek and English for centuries, to observe how morphosyntactic regulations of Turkish as a Matrix Language (Myers-Scotton, 2006) are (dis)obeyed by codeswitched lexemes and phrases. For this purpose, I draw from research within bilingual linguistics defining the morpho-syntactic regulations determining the interchangeability between two languages, especially the structures of codeswitching between an Embedded Language (source) and a Matrix Language (target) provided by the 4M-Model (Myers-Scotton, 2006), along with Boumans’ (2007) cross-linguistic analysis of periphrastic bilingual VP creations. While the former upgrades Poplack’s (1980) research on the typology of codeswitching by hierarchising the transferability of morphemes; the latter suggests periphrasis used in bilingual VP’s have recognisable patterns, and results from “intense language contact”. Using these models, I test their pertinence to Cypriot Turkish-English codeswitching, emphasising a morphosyntactic divergence from previous research on the Turkish-English pairing (Koban, 2013; Kemaloglu-Er, 2018). While this area of research highlights the overlooked role of contact in determining syntactic structure, it also provides a unique outlook on the emerging bilingual syntax used by Turkish-speaking Cypriots, and codeswitching as a sociolect between young bilingual Cypriots.

To study these, 2 semi-structured conversations were conducted with 2 pairs of speakers to ensure organic results, and the tokens of codeswitching were encoded as intra-sentential (word or NP embedding), inter-sentential (CP embedding), and extra-sentential (tag insertions, Poplack (1980)). The sample consisted of 4 Turkish-speaking Cypriot young adults in their early-twenties who have been using English academically, socially, and professionally for more than 10 years. From a total 90 minutes of recorded conversations, 143 tokens were collected, of which 49% were intra-sentential. Unlike Poplack’s (1980) suggestion that embedded words occur in bare forms, most of these embeddings (57%) were agglutinated with up to 2 suffixes for nouns and adjectives, and up to 4 suffixes for verbs. The most observed morphemes were the Turkish dative, accusative, and pluralisation suffixes, followed by possessive inflections. Moreover, bilingual VP formations, which made up 18% of the total tokens, heavily relied on periphrasis (61%) using “light verbs” (Alexiadou, 2011) such as “yap” ‘make’ (38%), “et” ‘do’ (15%), or “ol” ‘be’ (8%). For VP’s formed with an embedded verb and agglutination, the verb-making suffixes “-le(mek)” ‘(to) do’, or “-dı” ‘to be.(PST)’, and inflectional morphemes showing person, tense, and negation were utilised.

While mostly agreeing with the MFL and 4M-Model and ascertaining a positive correlation between intense language contact and periphrastic verb creations, the findings show that Cypriot Turkish behaves more like Cypriot Greek than Turkic languages when compared with Boumans’ suggestions. The density of agglutination on codeswitches are identical with Turkish words, showing they behave as assimilated lexical borrowings. Finally, these interesting forms highlight the positive attitude the young Cypriot Turkish-English bilinguals have on codeswitching, suggesting that it behaves as an identity-building tool within their community.

Alexiadiou, A. (2011). Remarks on the morpho-syntax of code-switching. Proceedings of the 9th in - Ternational Conference on Greek Linguistics, 44–55. https://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/ICGL/proceedings/5_Alexiadou_EDIT_44.pdf

Myers-Scotton, C. (2006). Multiple Voices: An Introduction to Bilingualism. Wiley-Blackwell. https://www.vlebooks.com/Product/Index/2025444?page=0

Boumans, L. (2007). The periphrastic bilingual verb construction as a marker of intense language contact. Evidence from Greek, Portuguese and Maghribian Arabic. In E. Ditters & H. Motzki (Eds.), Approaches to Arabic linguistics (pp. 291–311). Brill.

Poplack, S. & Dion, N. (2012). Myths and facts about loanword development. Language variation and change, 24(3): 279-315.

Kemaloğlu-Er, E. (2018). Patterns of Intrasentential Code-Switching in Turkish-English Bilingual Discourse: Testing the Free Morpheme and the Equivalence Constraint. Artıbilim: Adana Science and Technology University Journal of Social Science 2018, 1(2), 35–45. https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/612458