partiküllerine

Partiküllerine is a Turkish grammatical form used to indicate the indirect object or recipient in a sentence, roughly translating as “to their particles.” It illustrates Turkish agglutinative morphology, where a noun can accumulate suffixes to express number, possession, and case.

Formation and meaning

The base noun is partikül (particle). The plural suffix -ler/-lar yields partiküller (particles). The third-person plural possessive suffix -leri attaches to form a possessive phrase that can be rendered as partiküllerleri (their particles). A dative suffix -e/-a then attaches to the whole, producing a surface form such as partiküllerlerine or, in other contexts, partiküllerine, depending on vowel harmony and elision. The result communicates “to their particles” (the particles belonging to them).

Usage

Partiküllerine serves as an example of how Turkish stacks suffixes to encode role and reference in a single word. It can appear in sentences that direct action toward a referent’s objects, for instance: Onların partiküllerine dokunmayın. (Do not touch their particles.) It also appears in more descriptive phrases, such as “partiküllerine ilişkin çalışmalar” meaning “studies concerning their particles.”

See also

Turkish grammar, Turkish suffixes, Dative case, Possessive suffix, Agglutinative languages.