Hendrik E. Boeschoten Book order

This volume contains contributions in English and German on various topics of linguistic turcology. All contributors are in some way associated with the turcological department in Mainz. The articles cover a broad specter of linguistic fields such as syntax, phonology, morphophonology, semantics, pragmatics, lexicon, onomasitcs, socio-linguistics and language contact. All major branches of the Turkic languages are covered, with the focus of the individual contributions either on a single language or on several languages from a comparative perspective. Both synchronic and diachronic issues are addressed. There are contributions with either a descriptive or a theoretical bias.

The book contains an edition of a collection of six stories about Alexander Dhulqarnain found in a manuscript kept in St. Petersburg, together with a translation, analyses of the language and the literary content, and indices. The stories must have been written in some variety of Western Oghuz Turkic in Iran, but the manuscript itself is a rather late copy, produced in a Kipchak-Chaghatay environment (presumably Kazan). The content of the stories are of the adventurous kind, and betray a background of more or less popular performances by storytellers. One striking feature is the interest taken in mechanical contraptions, such as automata for the purpose of the defence of castles.

The volume contains contributions on contact-induced language change in situations in which one of the languages is a Turkic one. Most papers deal with cases of long-standing language contact. The geographic areas covered include the Balkans (Macedonian Turkish, Gagauz), Western Europe (Turkish-German, Turkish-Dutch contacts), Central Europe (Karaim), Turkey (Turkish-Kurdish, Turkish-Greek contacts, Old Ottoman Turkish), Iran (Turkic-Iranian contacts) and Siberia (Yakut-Tungusic contacts). The contributions focus on various phenomena of code interaction and on various types of structural changes in different contact settings. Several authors employ the Code Copying Model, which is presented in some detail in one of the articles.

Over the past decade Turkish linguistics has become a lively field of study, one that promises to yield new insights into the nature of the structure and use of the language. In the present volume an attempt is made to provide a basic understanding of current studies in the field. After a short introduction into the subject of modern Turkish, the following topics are dealt with by specialists of the specific phonology, syntax, semantics, language acquisition and language variation. Thus, the subject matter of the book is not restricted to structural aspects. Attention is also given to the development and use of the linguistic code both in Turkey and in the diaspora context experienced by Turkish families in Western and Northern Europe. The book aims at offering advanced students of both turkology and general linguistics an introduction to current research interests in the field of synchronic Turkish linguistics.