The Underlying Reasons for the Deletion of the Genitive Case or Person Agreement Marker in Some Turkish Words

This study investigates a morphological change in Turkish rendering itself in the form of omission of genitive case in some words for various reasons. The progression of this change is so gradual that average speakers of Turkish are losing their lexicon touchstone to perceive that there is a mutation in the form of the structure. Initially, this deletion has been observed in the names of the food in the forms of ‘mantar çorba' or 'bulgur pilav’, in the menus but today it spread to many fields. When the underlying reasons are examined, copying and generalizing the omission and ambiguity in a phrase on the Chomskian analysis of the phrase structure seem to play the most important role as well as the influence of anaphoric or cataphoric attachment. The expression ‘Çocuk Masa Takımı’ is an example for the phrase structure ambiguity whose deep structure can be surfaced as, pragmatically, (a) ‘a table-set for children’ and structurally, (b) ‘a table set which is a child’, where (b) is, of course, semantically farfetched. The omission of the genitive case has implications for language acquisition as well. Ekmekçi (1979) reports that the genitive case does not emerge at the age of 02;04. This age is late compared with the production of other case markers. It has also been observed that non-native fluent Turkish speakers omit genitive case in their oral production such as ‘bir sirke şişenin içinde yaşayan…’ or ‘Abi, çöp kutu nerde?’ rather than any other ones. Such data may be used in the explanation of the omission of the genitive case. The aim of this study is to bring forth the gradual but firm process of genitive case’s disappearance from some words which are produced in various contexts; and the predictable structures to lose it in the extended future.