The comparison of adjectival clauses in Turkish and English in terms of structure and meaning

Even though the significance of grammar in foreign language teaching is controversial, the knowledge regarding the structure of target language contributes to the use of that language. The topic underlying this study is verbal adjectives and its structural and semantic equivalents in English. The reason for the study is that learners whose mother tongue is not Turkish tend to compare the target structure with their own language and have difficulties while learning especially due to the differences between two languages. As for the reason why English has been chosen as the language to be compared, most probably learners of Turkish know English much better than other foreign languages. First of all, Turkish grammar books have been scanned and participles in Turkish have been described. Next, the book called Sineklerin Tanrısı has been read and a list has been formed with all the participles in this book. The reason why this book has been chosen is based on that there are many examples of participles in the book. Then the equivalent of every participle has been found in Lord of the Flies and added to the list. So, the corpus underlying this study has been formed. Finally, a hierarchy for probable difficulties has been prepared with the help of both structural and semantic equivalents that arose from the analysis of the corpus. This chart is expected to contribute to the process of learning the target structure (participles) especially for the ones who already know English but want to learn Turkish. Key words: verbal adjective, participle, Turkish as a foreign language, corpus