Copyright
Murad SuleymanovPublished On
2026-01-07Page Range
pp. 335–358Language
- English
Print Length
24 pages
8. Passive Formation in Turkic
Diachronic Developments and Synchronic Patterns with a Focus on Azeri
Chapter of: Passivisation in Semitic, Iranian, Armenian, and Beyond(pp. 335–358)
This chapter presents an overview of passive constructions in Turkic languages, with a focus on Azeri as a representative of the Oghuz branch. It examines diachronic developments in passive morphology, including the use of suffixes (-n, -Xn, -l, -Xl) and their interaction with transitivity. The chapter studies passive formations from transitive and intransitive verbs and complex predicates (also known as light verb constructions) as well as agent complements. It points to contact with Persian in the alternations that occur in complex predicates and in the higher registers of Azeri found in ‘educated speech’.
Contributors
Murad Suleymanov
(author)Associate Professor of Turkic Linguistics at Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales
(PhD, EPHE-PSL, Paris, 2019) is Associate Professor of Turkic Linguistics at Inalco, Paris. He also teaches Judaeo-Tat at the Oxford School of Rare Jewish Languages. His monograph A Grammar of Şirvan Tat (Wiesbaden: Reichert, 2020) draws on a corpus of Tat spontaneous speech, as well as tales, legends, anecdotes, and other folkloric texts collected during interviews with native speakers in Azerbaijan and Georgia. He has edited and translated into English an original Muslim Tat corpus of the Şirvan and Qonaqkənd dialects. His research centres on Iranian and Turkic languages, and the languages of the Caucasus, with particular attention to language contact, areal typology, variation and language change, morphology, and syntax.