A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

4.1. Grammatical description

The first linguistic work on TİD was conducted by Ulrike Zeshan with observations about the pronominal system, numerals, tense and aspect, non-manual markers, sentence types and classifiers in 2002. Later years saw the flourishing of TİD studies. The main topics studied are listed in the table below:

Topic	Example Study
Basic grammar	Açan (2001, 2007), Sevinç (2006)
Phonetics, phonology, and morphology	Kubuş (2008), Özkul (2013), Taşçı (2012), Sevinç (2015), Gökgöz (2018), Makaroğlu & İşsever (2018), Taşçı & Göksel (2018)
Non-manuals and sentence types	Zeshan (2006), Gökgöz & Arık (2011), Gökgöz (2011), Makaroğlu (2012), Göksel & Kelepir (2013), Özsoy et al. (2015), Özsoy & Kaşıkara (2018b), Özsoy et al. (2018c)
Syntax	Gökgöz (2009), Göksel & Kelepir (2016)
Semantics and pragmatics	Kelepir et al. (2018), Karabüklü (2018), Makaroğlu et al. (2018), Özkul (2019), Nuhbalaoğlu (2019), Saral (2019)
Signing Space	Arık (2013b), Özyürek et al. (2010)
Language acquisition	Sümer and Özyürek (2016), Sümer (2015a, 2015b), Sümer et al. (2017), Sevgi (2019), Sümer & Özyürek (2020)

(Adapted from Arık, 2013c: 3)

The first comprehensive TİD grammar book was prepared by Hasan Dikyuva, Bahtiyar Makaroğlu, and Engin Arık in 2015, by the support of the Ministry of Family and Social Policies. An English version of the book was published in 2017. The book is based on a 104 hours-long video database, out of which approximately 20% has been annotated (165.000 signs) with ELAN software. The sample is composed of 113 participants above the age of 12, who are native or near-native signers from 26 provinces. There are four to eight participants from each town, and four to five towns each from Western, North-Western, Central, Northern, Eastern, and Southern regions. The project team is composed of seven academic members and eight Deaf members specialized in various technical aspects.