Identifiying modality features of Turkish and reflecting these features to grammar teaching

Grammar, which can be defined as the whole system and structure of a language, is used for comprehension and conveying the meaning in Turkish language instruction in accordance with the constructivist approach. A language category that is effective in comprehension and conveying the meaning is modality, which is a semantic phenomenon. In this sense, modality as a category that enables one to express factual and non-factual situations is a subject that should be emphasised in grammar instruction. Describing modality that is a category related to grammatical tense and aspect, determining the course contents to teach it and including it in textbooks is of great importance. Therefore, the modal areas of mood, tense and aspect affixes in Turkish verb inflection should be identified through a synchronous analysis. This study aimed at determining the modal meanings that morphemes mark other than tense, aspect and mood by means of a detailed analysis of affixes in Turkish verb inflection. Palmer's (2001) typology of modality was adopted in determining the meaning areas of modality that morphemes mark. The document analysis method was used in this qualitative study, and the survey design was employed. The corpus examined in accordance with the synchronous approach consisted of texts selected through purposive sampling among those written in Turkish as of 2000. The "Text Types in Terms of Structures and Functions" proposed by Dilidüzgün (2010) was used in the selection of the texts. Among these text types, the ones to be examined were determined based on expert opinion. The text types were limited in terms of the number of texts since a sub-corpus was compiled for each text type. The data gathered from the texts were analysed and interpreted by means of the content analysis method. In the process of analysis and interpretation, the modal areas marked by the mood, tense and aspect affixes used in verb inflection were determined with a semantic-pragmatic approach. As a result, the modal areas marked by morphemes in Turkish verb inflection were identified according to Palmer's (2001) typology. Furthermore, it was pointed out that the forms of expression marked by morphemes should be focused in grammar instruction by highlighting the functions in addition to structures. Key Words: Grammar instruction, grammatical tense, aspect, mood, modality