Structural features of existential sentences in Old Turkic and in South Siberian Turkic languages in a comparative perspective

A comparative analysis of the structural features of existential nominal sentences in Old Turkic and modern South Siberian Turkic languages is presented. A deep structural affinity is posited between these stages of the language, identifying unique developments in copula selection, subject agreement strategies, and the expression of negation and Tense-Aspect-Mood (TAM) categories. In these nominal sentences, the predicate is expressed by a nominal, requiring an existential copula to mark non-present TAM categories. This copula agrees with the subject in person and number (for first and second persons). For third-person subjects, agreement is primarily in person, with less consistent agreement in number. While Old Turkic relied heavily on the now-lost copula är- (“to be”), modern Siberian languages have introduced positional verbs (e.g., lexical “lie”) into the copula inventory -a feature absent in Old Turkic. The research further distinguishes the present tense marking strategies: Altai Turkic relies on the grammatical subject, Khakass and Shor utilize synthesized or cliticized personal pronouns, and Old Turkic and Tuvan employ personal pronouns following the predicate without phonetic transformation. Applied to the copula verb before TAM markers, the verbal negation affixes -mA / -BA denote entity absence irrespective of temporal aspect. Of significance is the persistence of the nominal predicates var / bar / par (“existence”) and yok / d’oq / čoq (“non-existence”). Unlike Modern Turkish, Old Turkic and South Siberian languages retain these nominals in past and future contexts rather than replace them with purely verbal copulas. Finally, the study notes that existential copulas remain essential for embedding nominal sentences as dependent clauses within complex constructions.

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