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Turkish makes use of two valency markers: (i) the causative marker with 'tur' which increases valency in (1) below, and (ii) the anticausative marker 'il' which decreases valency as in (2) below.

(1)

(ben) Hasan -8     kitab -1    oku  -t     -tu   -m
I     Hasan -lld:. book  -kc.  read -Caus. -Past -l.sg.
"I made Hasan read the book"

(from Kornfilt, 1997, p.331)

(2)

Kapį aç-il-di. <br/>
Door open-ANTIC-PAST <br/>
‘The door opened.’ <br/>

(from Haspelmath, 1987, p.2)

Combining these two markers renders ungrammaticality in some languages, but I'm not sure whether ungrammaticality follows in Turkish, i.e. when we combine both of these markers. I'm not a native speaker, so I cannot tell. What I want with this is to find an authentic sentence whereby 'tur' is combined with 'il' in the same stem and see whether they render the sentence ungrammatical or not.

*I apologize for the previous way in which this question has been asked.

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1 Answer 1

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Definitely, it's especially common for certain verbs.

Bir ev tahliye **ettirildi**

Bir ev tahliye ettirildi

Translation:

A house was evacuated

In Istanbul, following the past earthquake many houses cracked (sic.). Among these, opposite of the Süreyyapaşa factory in Balat, was a new four-story stone house whose cracks were deemed so dangerous that yesterday security officers (sic.) escorted the renters outside while their belongings were transported to another location.

(Cumhuriyet Gazetesi. 4 May 1935, p. 2.)

  • Here tahliye is a word which means an evacuation. (I'll spare you the ultimate derivation to keep things as simple as possible)
  • To make it into a verb we use the word etmek. "tahliye etmek" means "to evacuate"
  • Let's make it causative, "tahliye ettirmek" would be to order an evacuation.
  • Finally what would be the fate of one who has had an evacuation ordered for them? Pop in the anti-causative -il and you get "tahliye ettirilmek"
  • Because this is from a newspaper and we're reporting it, you can conjugate it in the third person plural* and past tense yielding: "tahliye ettirildi"

    • (* The third person plural is equivalent to the singular in a lot of cases, such as when the subjects are humans)

And that's the gist of it.

Also note that there are a few other forms of the causative as well so you might also come across pişirilmek (to get cooked) or kapatıldı (to be/get shut down).

So for instance:

Akşam için muhteşem bir yemek pişirilmiş.

A wonderful meal has been cooked for the evening.

Or:

Eski ofisimiz kapatıldı ama yenisi şu adreste açıldı.

Our old office was closed but the new one opened at this address here.

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    Thank you. You're right about the newspaper language, reporters tend to hide AGENCY by using passive voice, anticausative voice, etc. I asked this question because I have noticed that morphological causative (MC) and morphological anticausative (MA) do not co-occur in Berber, while the MC and passive do occur. It's well known that passives have hidden agency (by-phrases), but morphological agentless in Berber. Passive agency can be accessed by some tests. But the AM agency cannot, meaning that it doesn't exist, are you sue that this is a MC and MA co-occurence not a MC and passive?
    – Tsutsu
    Commented Jul 28, 2019 at 10:10
  • "But the AM agency cannot, meaning that it doesn't exist, are you sue that this is a MC and MA co-occurence not a MC and passive?" @TsutsuT. I apologize for the late response it took me several re-reads to understand what exactly you were asking. Well I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you're kind of on the right track because the Turkish anti-causative is often called a passive (especially if you're working with Turkish materials). As for the bad one, the preference of passive over anti-causative is more so due to philological tradition. Commented Aug 11, 2019 at 5:40
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    I think I'll conclude this with "O Eğ-di" (He bent something? What did he bend I don't know) [3rd P. Sing.] [Bent][-di Past Tense Marker][no conjugation] ||| "O Eğ-il-di" (He was bent, that is to say he bowed. Somehow. I can't assign a proper agent.This is a nice example for supporting the anti-causative paradigm over the passive paradigm) [3rd P. Sing.] [Bent][ANTIC][-di Past Tense Marker][no conjugation] ||| "O Eğ-dir-il-di" (He was made to bow. Who made him bow? I could just assign a "by-phrase" if I must ) [3rd P. Sing.] [Bent][CAUS][ANTIC][-di Past Tense Marker][no conjugation] Commented Sep 20, 2019 at 7:00
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    Ok, and I'm telling you the ABC suffix is -dir. Based on how 99% of the agglutination in Turkish occurs by post-appending suffixes, the "traditional" logic to explain this would be that -dir (deliberately not -dir-) has "pacified" the verb eğ-dir-mek. There's not much room for further discussion here. I think what you might actually be interested in could be the nuance in the preference of -n (rare that a verb should be able to take both but eğmek will suffice, eği-n-mek to "tend" or display a "tend"ency) or -r (eğirmek, to spin/loom, but this is often taken to be a separate root) over -il. Commented Sep 27, 2019 at 12:19
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    To be honest I don't think there's an agreement on this. The "rules" are that it's a "-n" for verbs ending in vowels and "-il" for those ending in vowels with the "-r"s being irregulars. You will however sometimes see examples like this were they don't quite fit this as well as a lot of "-nil-" where they follow one another but this is often shrugged off as misspeech. If you are still insistent on searching for such an ABC suffix than I'd recommend you start by reading up on these alternative forms your self, but again "no agreement" so don't expect to find your answer here either. Commented Sep 27, 2019 at 12:35

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