A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

Verbs inflected with an imperfective morpheme are presented as a whole unit without internal structure, and thus, terminated or completed. Perfectivity in TİD is usually expressed with an accentuated movement of the verb and the mouth gesture ‘bn’.

 

'bn'

 

eat

 

 

‘bn’ can only occur with eventive predicates. When ‘bn’ cooccurs with an atelic verb such as an activity, it expresses the meaning of termination (of the activity):

 

 

 

                       'bn'
thıs mornıng play

 

‘I played this morning.’

 

 

When it cooccurs with a telic verb, especially an accomplishment, it expresses the meaning of completion (of the event): 

 

 

 

                                'bn'

 

yesterday evenıng cook

‘I cooked yesterday evening.’

 

 

When a verb is reduplicated to express multiple occurrences of an event, ‘bn’ cooccurs with each articulation of the verb.

 

 

            'bn' 'bn' 'bn'
yesterday evenıng house go go go

 

‘Yesterday evening I kept going to homes.’

 

 

 ‘bn’ also frequently cooccurs with the lexical completive marker fınısh [Lexicon – 3.3.2.].

 

 

 

 

 

                        'bn'

husband3a poss₃ thıs mornıng work fınısh ıx3a 

 

 

Further, some subtypes of perfective, namely, iterative, inceptive/inchoative and completive, can also be marked with manual and/or non-manual markers.