On Necessity in Cypriot Turkish

Abstract

This paper focuses on the expression of necessity as a modal notion in Cypriot Turkish. A qualitative analysis of data gathered from various sources reveals that periphrastic or lexical expressions such as mecbur‘obliged,’ lazım ‘necessary,’ illa ‘insistently,’ mutlaka ‘definitely,’ etc. rather than the necessitative mood marker -mAlI serve to express various subcategories of necessity in Cypriot Turkish. These findings suggest that necessity in Cypriot Turkish is less grammaticalized than in Standard Turkish. For an adequate account of the behaviour of the structures analyzed, a number of further semantic and pragmatic notions seem to be required in addition to those offered by the logical approach to modality.

Keywords

• Cypriot Turkish
• modality
• necessity
• epistemic
• deontic
• obligation