On the historical development of the functions of Kendi ‘self’ in modern Turkish [Türkiye türkçesindeki Kendi biçimbiriminin İşlevlerinin tarihsel gelişimi Üzerine]

This paper focuses on the historical development of the five major functions of the kendi/kendi- morpheme in Modern Turkish based on various texts (from the 8th-18th centuries) reflecting the properties of the Turkish language within the socalled Old Turkic, Old Anatolian Turkish and Ottoman Turkish periods. Kendi, which was initially a nominal particle with intensifying and modifying functions, can now serve as a reflexive, resumptive and simple third person pronoun having been nominalized through the addition of possessive, case and number suffixes. The morpheme öz, which formerly had similar functions, seems to have been gradually degrammaticalized in two varieties of Western Turkic, namely Modern Turkish and Gagauz Turkish, while still retaining its reflexive pronominal and modifying functions in most of the other Turkic varieties. © 2015, Ahmet Yesevi University. All rights reserved.