Functional analysis of adverb-verb suffixes in Old Uygur Turkish

Linguistic, semantic and morphological studies on the Turkish language are increasing day by day. Adverbial verbs are an important structure that has made significant contributions to sentence structure throughout the historical periods of the Turkish language, capable of establishing numerous semantic relationships such as purpose-result, cause-effect, time, condition, comparison, condition, limitation, connection, relativity, intensification, contrast, and conjunction. Works from the Old Uyghur period are valuable in terms of linguistic history and provide a rich ground for examining the usage characteristics of these structures. In this study, adverbial verb suffixes found in various religious and educational texts, primarily Buddhist texts, were identified and classified functionally; their contribution to understanding their role within the text and their functional roles in the narrative were analysed. In this study, a total of five works from the Old Uyghur Turkish period (The Story of Aç Bars, Kuanşi İm Pusar, Maytrısimit, Huastuanift, Irk Bitig) were scanned. In the scan, transcription studies previously conducted on these works were taken as a basis, and no new reading or translation work was carried out. The functions of adverbial verbs in the works have been determined, and the frequency of use and variety of meanings of these adverbial verb suffixes have been revealed. Adverbial suffixes have been classified according to 12 semantic functions; of these, the functions of context, case, cause, time, condition, limitation, and descriptive verb have been identified; however, no examples of the functions of means, comparison, contrast, relativity, and intensification have been found in the scanned works. Although the presence of adverbial verb suffixes was known in some examples found in the scanned works, the functions of the suffixes within the sentence could not be determined due to reasons such as the incompleteness of the text and the fading of some letters. In conclusion, it has been established that adverbial verbs had a wide range of usage in the Old Uyghur Turkish period, exhibited polysemy, and performed important functions in terms of adding meaning to sentences. Keywords: Old Uyghur Turkish, Functional Linguistics, Adverbial Verb Suffixes.