Abstract
GRAVITATION PRINCIPLE AND HIERARCHY OF CONTIGUITY IN TURKISH
The present study is oriented on Gravitation Principle (GP) which interprets fundamental formation process of lingual structuring as that Linguistic item creating gravitational field in any grammatical operation pulls on other items (morphemes) at potential positions” and its appearances in Turkish. GP is found in two types and two stages: Inherent Lexical Gravitation (ILG) and Intent-driven Syntactic Gravitation (IDSG). ILG takes place in the region where the vocabulary and long-term memory or in the periphery of these fields. This type of gravitation allows occurrence of hereditary grammar with universal quality and basic grammar specific to mother tongue. This occurrence is uniform, automatic (non-purposeful) and passive. It does not only introduce an interpretation to inflectional suffix with syntactic gravitation task, but also to phrases of derivative suffixes. On the other hand, IDSG is a grammatical gravitation formed according to the intention of the language user. This is the second phase of gravitation. It is active and optional. This type of gravitation is also capable of explaining why some predicate frames are associated with alternation operation in more than one way. At this generation field, inflection morphemes are employed predominantly rather than derivation. It is observed that grammatical units inflected from ILG to IDSG base are affixed to the base in certain system. This phrase is regulated by a rule referred as Hierarchy of Contiguity. In the present study, concrete expressions of aforesaid hierarchy were interpreted through Turkish examples; and various dimensions of GP and its types diversified from the generative language model reported by Chomsky (1995) in The Minimalist Program.
Keywords
Turkish, Gravitation Principle, Hierarchy of Contiguity, Inherent Lexical Gravitation, Intent-driven