The Typology of Relative Clause Constructions in Orkhon Turkic
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The American linguist, Noam Chomsky, made significant contributions to linguistic research by arguing that all languages in the world derive from a universal grammar and that syntactic differences in languages have emerged through certain transformations. His understanding of deep and surface structures in language has shed light on how languages work. This article first introduces Chomsky's theory of tranformational-generative grammar, which he developed in the 1950s as well as his government and binding theory developed in the 1980s. It then analyzes the typology of relative clauses within the context of Orkhon Turkic. In Turkey studies on relative clauses often employ a morphological approach. This study considers the relative clause as a structure instead and analyzes it from a morphosyntactic-semantic perspective. In other words, the study regards the relative clause not only as a word but also as a morphosyntactic element that plays a role both in its own governing domain and in the governing domain of the independent clause. The study looks into the role played by the modified noun transferred from the deep to the surface structure and attempts to determine the typology of the relative clause structure that emerges as a result of this process.