Contrastive Semantic Analysis of Albanian and Turkish Case Systems

The study of how meaning is encoded in a language is the central business of semantics, and it is generally assumed that its main concern is with the meanings of words as lexical items. But we should note that it is not only concerned with words as such. Meaning also figures at levels of language below the word and above it (Widowson, 1996). So it is concerned with the meaning of morphemes. Case marking and declination system as such topic is maybe the most complex and abstract lingual mean which was treated in many theory frameworks. The contrastive analysis of two different languages such are Turkish and Albanian will enable us to see more clearly all the fact about these systems, by detecting the similarities and differences between. This paper deals with the description of declinations of two languages (Turkish and Albanian) on the semantic level. As corpus for the analysis we have used the novel “My name is Red/Benim Adım Kırmızı” by Orhan Pamuk and its Albanian translation ‘Unë jam e kuqja’ by Drita Ç.Turdiu. Our aim is to gain frequency information and quantification of similar and different uses of same suffixes, their syntactical functions and semantic roles of relations they establish with other entities. Our analysis will be based on Turkish.

Keywords

cases, case suffıxes, semantic roles, Turkish, Albanian, contrastive analysis, corpus