Abstract
Having been under the influence of Persian, Azeri Turkish has borrowed not only lexical but also grammatical elements from Persian and accordingly has undergone phonetic, semantic, and syntactic changes (Mahmoodi, 2021, p. 3). One of those elements coming into Azeri Turkish is ‘ki’. This functions not only as relative pronoun and complementizer but also as focus marker. The representation of ‘ki’ has been dealt with in this study. Once its functional behavior as a focus marker is explored, the relevant tree diagrams based on the Minimalistic Program will be drawn. It will be shown that, just as in Persian, ‘ki’ attaches to any constituent ( to subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, verbs) in situ and makes it prominent. The focus phrase including focus marker ‘ki’ can be seen in different positions throughout the sentence. The preposing of focalized element including focus marker ‘ki’ to the beginning of the sentence seems to be just for topicalization, that is to say, the topicalized element can be focalized element as well.
Main Subjects
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