Turkic morphology seen by the Arabic grammarians. The passive

Abstract

This paper deals with the analyses of medieval Arab grammarians of passive and resultative verbs in Turkic. In Arabic grammatical theory, certain forms are correlated with unique meanings. In Arabic there are basically two types of passives: first, an internal apophonic passive, indicated by a vowel shift within the verbal root, e.g. /faˁila/ → /fuˁila/; secondly, a passive indicated by the prefix in- attached to the root, i.e. Form VII, which results in the infinitive pattern infiˁāl —yet verbal forms construed according to the VII paradigm are in addition often interpreted as resultative verbs. In Turkic, verbs can be passivized by adding an -Vl- to the verbal stem (under some criteria this is -Vn-), e.g. ˀur- ‘hit’ → ˀur-ul- ‘be hit’; the Turkish -Vn- form also expresses the reflexive form, e.g. ˀur-un- ‘hit oneself’. In addition, other suffixes may indicate passivization. This poses problems for the grammarians, which they tackle in similar but also very distinct ways: the distinctions between the two passive forms in Arabic, the missing resultative in Turkic, the passive in Turkic, the notion of stem in Turkic versus root in Arabic theory, the position of the inserted element, the criteria according to which the Turkic passive form is not -Vl- but instead -Vn-, to name but a few.