A Grammar of Turkish Sign Language (TİD)

Similar to the associative suffix -l-i, the agentive suffix is also borrowed from Turkish. It imparts various meanings to the form it creates such as a person selling something, or the occupation of a person. On a par with -l-i, the agentive suffix has two forms that display a reduced form of vowel harmony, yielding the forms -c-i and -c-u. One form of water+agentive suffix ‘water vendor’ (su+cu in Turkish) is given below:

                    water                                               c                                                             u

‘water vendor’

     (based on Göksel & Taşçı 2016: 379)

In this example, the sign for water is followed by c and u. Note that the shape of the first letter of the agentive suffix ‘c’ happens to have the same handshape of the form for the sign person which has a different orientation and a downward movement, see [Morphology – 1]. The sign person can also be used instead of -c-ı/u with an agentive meaning (e.g. work^person ‘worker’).

Agentive forms are rather infrequent in the TİD lexicon, an unexpected fact given that Turkish has a vast number of words containing the agentive suffix. Commonly used signs with the agentive suffix are listed in the table below and their Turkish counterparts have the agentive suffix, too.

(Özyürek et al. 2004)

Not all signs with agentive meanings contain the agentive suffix. commentator and carer are two examples.