Reporting clauses in Turkish as a sentence type of mixed construction

Reporting clauses are mixed construction sentences that convey in various ways what is thought or told, with the help of the quotations involved. Named in the literature as nested compound sentence in regards to its structure, is functionally a reporting clause. The quotation that corresponds to the internal sentence is called the reported clause. When the reported clause enjoins or connects to the predicate of the main sentence, this form as a whole denotes a reporting clause. The reporting clause can be in two forms as direct and indirect, depending on the figure of speech or the point of view of the reporter. This study examined the construction of reporting clauses with diachronic linguistic approach based on syntactic analysis. The reporting clauses were identified from the texts surveyed by document analysis method. The identified reporting clauses were assessed in the context of the relations regarding their construction and string of elements based different historical periods. This was done by tracing the formation of mixed construction in selected texts since Orhun Turkish in order to demonstrate the diversity caused by the string of elements. In accordance with the findings of this study, it was concluded that the usage of ti- verb as a predicate, the adjoining of the object as a form, three-element reporting clauses in terms of number ofelements, and last but not least, direct reported clauses as the type of reporting dominated the scene in the construction of the reporting clauses.