About the Correlation of the Case and Preposition Semantics in Berbić's Description of the Bosnian and Turkish Languages

Abstract

The starting point for a possible solution to one of very interesting issues in today.s European Turkology in the field of contrastive linguistics . as to how the meaning of Indo-European prepositions is expressed in Turkish . is the solution to the correlation of the case and preposition semantics. The paper gives a review of that kind of correlation of cases and prepositions in the Bosnian and Turkish languages by the example of Berbic.s Bosnian-Turkish grammar book Boşnakça Türkçe Muallimi . Bosanski turski učitelj (The Bosnian Turkish Teacher 1893). The author of the paper came to the following conclusion: at describing nouns in the Bosnian language, Berbić formally, too, separates cases from prepositions as different linguistic units. At describing cases and .prepositions. in the Turkish language, Berbić often uses the same linguistic units for some cases and prepositions. But, since he gives a description of the word type which in terms of classification formally does not exist in Turkish (description of prepositions), on the one hand, and since parallel with that he gives a description of the case and preposition semantics in the mother tongue (L1) and the Turkish (L2) language, a very interesting phenomenon is manifested, i.e., that it is first attempted to draw from the Bosnian prepositions some abstract, universal category of the .prepositional. meaning, which formally and in terms of classification is attempted to apply to the grammatical system of the Turkish (L2) language. Briefly, on the basis of the meaning of a part of speech in the mother (L1) tongue, a .new. part of speech is introduced in Turkish (L2), counting also some case endings in (and almost equate with) the part of speech being named as prepositions (in L2 language). Therefore, the correlation of cases and prepositions is manifest, as seen from the grammar, both at morphological-syntactic and synthetic-semantic levels, and the correlation of the meanings of cases and prepositions in L1 and L2 languages, we may conclude, is the universal characteristic on the basis of which their contrasting was realised in the Bosnian and Turkish languages.