The equivalent of junk food for the writer is redundancy, and the job of the editor is to count calories and impose diets.
—Bruce O. Boton
I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
—Vladimir Nabokov
Repetition, Repetitiveness, and Redundancy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly in Writing
Most languages, including English and Turkish, share a stylistic convention of preferring varied to repetitive expression. Intuitively, we feel that repetition (as an act of repeating explicitly the same, or almost the same, lexical word or phrase) sounds monotonous and boring. Nevertheless, both languages abound in all kinds of seemingly repetitive and uneconomical lexicalized and idiomatic duplications and reduplications, even though we logically sense that repetitiveness is unnecessary and, therefore, inefficient, preventing us from exchanging as much information as possible. Furthermore, as any student can attest, practice makes perfect, and occasional repetition can only reinforce understanding. In short, human communication, whether in speech or writing, means finding a balance between our conflicting needs and aspirations: that is, between economy and emotion, polite, pragmatic consideration of others and self-service, and ultimately between repetition and variation.
We should, therefore, know how to differentiate between the good repetitions (e.g., emphatic expressive repetitions, pragmatic repetition of the recurrent names and themes for narrative coherence, rhetorical and stylistic repetitions signaling parallelism or contrast); our general impulse to avoid bad, or stylistically unvaried repetitiveness (unless it’s needed for consistency or clarity); and the tacit consensus existing among language users to collectively reject semantically superfluous and, therefore, stylistically clumsy redundancies (or tautologies, and pleonasms).
Ultimately, we must also be careful to distinguish between good repetitions and bad, disguised tautological repetitions, or redundancies, camouflaged by rephrasing. Tautological redundancy occurs when we explicitly add something to the sentence that is already stated in the sentence or that can be implicitly inferred from its context. Young writers may add such redundant elements as “padding” to make their sentences longer. Even more experienced, published Turkish writers, of both fiction and nonfiction books, are occasionally “guilty” of redundancies—for a number of reasons, including for “padding” with pleonastic verbal modifiers or excessive enumerations, functioning as a mechanism of delaying in a language constrained by its verb-final and head-final structure. The structure and the history of the Turkish language, specifically the pronoun-dropping nature of Turkish and the stylistic preference in Turkish of the asyndetic-paratactic (conjunction-less coordinative) linking of sentence constitutes, may account for the prevalence of both idiomatic, lexicalized (nonredundant) reduplications and repetitive (redundant) duplications.
While incorrect repetition can actually constitute a grammatical error (e.g., the so-called repeated name penalty or faulty parallelism), semantic redundancy is not a grammatical error per se. In fact, some repetitiveness and redundancy are either tolerated or syntactically inevitable. Nevertheless, semantic duplication in the immediate context is considered stylistically infelicitous.
Redundancies thus have to do with the dimension of language that is not easy to define—the style. Style-related issues seem to work at the level of both intuition and reason, having been collectively and historically internalized by native speakers of a given language. Semantically unnecessary and, therefore, stylistically awkward redundancies belong to the realm of usage, which expresses the unspoken consensus among language users on linguistic expressions, embodying the meeting-place of the functional and the elegant in language.
Redundant ‘Padding’ as a Mechanism of Delaying
The literary Turkish is governed by two syntactic principles—the head-final (or dependent-before-head) principle, which forces Turkish to place any dependent constituents before the constituents they depend on (their heads), and the verb-final principle, which determines the word order of a canonical (basic) sentence in Turkish as subject-object-verb (SOV). The implication of these principles is that no new dependent elements may be added after the final verb of the basic sentence. Instead, any extra information must be placed inside the core sentence: either around the subject or around the object.
The verb-final syntax of the Turkish language has led to the establishment of its dominant sentence style—the periodic sentence (or suspensive sentence), which delays the predicate of the sentence until the end. The delay of the final verb upon which almost all other constituents in the sentence depend on, including the subject and the object, requires certain preplanning. On the other hand, preplanned syntax also means that the only way a sentence can be expanded is by delaying getting to the final verb for as long as possible. One can say that the sentence expansion in Turkish involves the grammatical mechanism of delaying. Incidentally, delaying is also how we can generate suspense, by alternating between tension and release, which, in literary terms, is achieved by delaying the dramatic resolution, or the denouement, of a story.
Turkish writers, not having the luxury of expanding sentences with new dependent elements after the sentence's final verb (since any sentence element placed after the final verb loses its prominence and automatically becomes de-emphasized), can add new material to or revise the sentence only by inserting such material inside the core sentence, i.e., by delaying the resolution of the sentence.
The eagerness to delay the completion of the sentence in Turkish may compel one to prolong and keep prolonging the sentence by “padding” it with extraneous decorative modifiers or by extending a list of parallel constituents with duplicated items. As a result, Turkish sentences often have lengthy introductory and/or interrupting constructions, including long “padded” subjects (and objects), some as long as a clause.
‘Padding’ with Redundant Modifiers & Enumerations
Unlike English writers, who are cautious about having long subjects, which interrupt the connection between the subject and the verb, and who are very careful not to insert anything that breaks the connection between the verb and the object, Turkish writers are comfortable expanding all three core constituents of the sentence, with interrupting lengthy modifiers.
For example, if the added information is formed as a subordinate clause, it has to be embedded within the sentence as a nominalized phrase (verbal) so that the embedding does not violate the Turkish canonical SOV word order. Extremely usable, although by no means convenient, these bulky verbals are regularly utilized for modification of the core constituents—and sometimes redundantly.
The universality of verbals (they can replace nouns, adjectives, or adverbs) makes them prolific and easy to use for “padding”, especially the longer passive forms of verbals and converbs, which are prone to redundancy when they duplicate the meaning of the modified noun or verb. For example, the -(y)arak converb can be used for “padding” by duplicating the meaning of the predicate. As the example below show, virgülle bağlamak (to connect with a comma) clearly duplicates virgül koymak (to place a comma), so one of these actions is redundant, or tautological:
Virgül konarak, elde edilen iki cümle virgülle bağlanılır.
(lit. By placing a comma, the two resulting sentences are connected with a comma.)
Elde edilen iki cümle virgülle bağlanılır.
The two resulting sentences are connected with a comma.
In Turkish, redundancy is often caused by a single modifier added as a -(y)an or -diği verbal whose meaning is already implied by the noun it modifies or by the overall context of the sentence. (Such modifiers are referred to as pleonastic.) For example, depending on the context, the verbal above elde edilen (obtained) can be used as a kind of a specifying discourse connective (in which case it can still be replaced by the shorter and more precise demonstrative pronoun bu), or it can be redundant:
Bu iki cümle virgülle bağlanılır.
These two sentences are connected with a comma.
To compensate for the verb-final restriction, Turkish allows to interrupt (and delay) the resolution of almost any dependency link in sentences by inserting new dependent material in the form of a verbal (or converb). In the sentence below, the verb is modified (and delayed) by a cluster of adverbials (biz gelmeden önce, birkaç kez, inceden inceye), and the entire sentence is modified, and delayed, by the introductory belli, which functions like a discourse connective (even though, in reality, it's an inverted predicate of a complex sentence paraphrased as an informally paratactic sentence for easier processing). Moreover, the subject (ev) of the sentence is delayed by being backgrounded to the post-verb area:
Belli, biz gelmeden önce birkaç kez inceden inceye temizlenmişti ev.
Clearly, the house had been meticulously cleaned several times before we arrived.
Murathan Mungan, “Sinop’a Gelin Giden” (Kadından Kentler)
In another sentence, the link between the subject and the predicate is interrupted by the verb-modifying similarity-clause gibi (see below):
Başı, üç günden beri olduğu gibi, kurdelesizdi.
Her hair had been missing its bow now for days.
Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Huzur
Even the link between the genitive and possessive components of a noun-noun compound can be interrupted, as illustrated below. Here, the interrupted compound (yaşamlarındaki bu küçük değişikliğin ... büyüsüne) is embedded within another embedded structure (kapılan), the -(y)an verbal that modifies the subject of the sentence and contributes to its substantial length. The interrupting genitive-case-marked noun phrase (biraz da Nuri'deki aykırılığın) is parallel to the genitive component, thus creating a pair of items (an enumeration, or a list). And finally, both genitive-case-marked items are further modified by other constituents:
┌───────────────┌─────────────┐
[Yaşamlarındaki bu küçük değişikliğin] (biraz da Nuri'deki aykırılığın) [büyüsüne] kapılan köylüler, gözlerinde kocaman soru işaretleriyle yönlerini ona çevirmişlerdi hemen.
Then he pulled up a chair, to sit with his fellow villagers. It struck them as sorcery, this small change in their routine.
Hasan Ali Toptaş, Gölgesizler
In contrast, to compensate for its strict sentential word ordering, the head-medial English allows more flexibility in the way English phrases can expand. While Turkish phrases are allowed to branch out only in one direction—to the left of the head, i.e., by taking pre-dependents only—English heads can take both pre- and post-dependents (branching out to both right and left). This is especially useful when a head can have several structured modifiers. In English, the structurally varying dependent forms tend to be carefully balanced around the head: two modifiers of the same head noun would be placed on each side of the noun, with the longer one invariably placed the last (to minimize the core interruptions and to help process the sentence), as illustrated below:
It looks like a [fun] book [about being different].
In Turkish, however, the modifiers of the same head are piled up on the same side, to the left of the head, interrupting and delaying the core constituents:
[Farklı olmak ile ilgili] [eğlenceli] bir kitaba benziyor.
👉 To summarize, the head-final, verb-final, and left-branching structuring of the Turkish language inevitably leads to the one-sided piling up of dependents (by either stacking them up or by embedding them within other embedded structures) and the ballooning of the sentence’s core constituents, including by inserting empty, unnecessary, or repetitive “padding” expressions to make our writing appear longer or more formal.
The mechanism of delaying by “padding” can take a variety of forms. One of the most common delaying tactics by “padding” involves duplicating the sentence's verb or other verbal forms with synonyms. Such duplications can be found in both fiction and nonfiction in Turkish. For example, in the sentence below, both the verbal and the verb are duplicated, rather redundantly, with synonymic forms. In fact, to me, the whole sentence below appears superfluous, since it states the obvious, only in a rather awkward manner:
İnsanlar bilebildikleri, kullanabildikleri sözcükler çevresinde düşünürler, üretirler.
(lit., We think and create around the words that we can learn and use.)
Contemporary Turkish Literature, ed. Yakup Çelik and Emine Kolaç
Another “padding” tactic, which is especially common in formal and officialese writing, is the use of a passive verb construction, which makes the verb form longer and seemingly more formal and polite. Final verbs can be further extended by being converted into verb complexes with yet another added verb (typical of the formal register). For example, below, the extension of the passive verb gerçekleştirilmek with the verb çalışılmak results in the prolonged, and superfluous, expression gerçekleştirilmeye çalışılır instead of the simpler gerçekleştirilir:
Millî eğitimin amaçları yalnız resmi ve özel eğitim kurumlarında değil, aynı zamanda [evde, çevrede, işyerlerinde], her yerde ve her fırsatta gerçekleştirilmeye çalışılır.
The objectives of national education are realized not only in public and private educational institutions, but also at home, in the environment, in workplaces—everywhere and at every opportunity.
Milli Eğitim Temel Kanunu, 1739 Sayılı Kanun
👉 The sentence above reveals another common “padding” technique: the addition of a summative appositive construction, which by definition duplicates another constituent in the sentence. In the sentence, the expression her yerde ve her fırsatta duplicates the series of adverbials evde, çevrede, işyerlerinde, without adding any extra information. In fact, summative appositives are stylistically too empathic to be used in the formal register, given the nature of the document. In Turkish, summative appositives, in addition to other appositive constructions, remain understudied, having been analyzed only as part of the larger category of ara sözler.
Preference for Asyndetic-Paratactic Style in Turkish
As a means of delaying the completion of the sentence, the periodic sentence can lend itself to cataloguing and enumerating things, including modifiers of the core constituents, which may quickly become excessive and redundant. To ease the pressure caused by the rigid structure of the periodic sentence, Turkish has developed a strong stylistic preference for building sentences without conjunctions or other connectives, including sentences with pairs or series of parallel items. Linguists refer to such a style of connecting constituents as asyndetic parataxis.
The constraints imposed by the preplanned syntax and the finalizing effect of the Turkish verb are somewhat balanced off by the general stylistic preference in Turkish for looser, more fluid, non-finalizing linking of constituents by merely placing them next to each other—by juxtaposing them—without using any formal linking device. In rhetoric, such style is defined as asyndetic parataxis (from Greek “placing side by side unconnectedly”), as opposed to syndetic parataxis (from Greek “placing side by side as bound together”), the style of linking constituents with explicitly stated conjunctions, which is generally preferred in English.
Implicit in the Turkish preference for the asyndetic-paratactic style of linking constituents is the penchant for enumerating, listing, itemizing, and cataloging things.
Conjunctions are not “native” to Turkish, and the genuinely Turkish way of connecting items in sentences is by simply placing them side by side. Asyndetic juxtapositions come natural to Turkish speakers and writers. Clauses, phrases, or single words are frequently listed with just a comma marking the boundaries between them, without the nature of the connection being explicitly indicated. Despite the common (mis)understanding of the comma as an additive device, in Turkish it can convey a range of connections, including “and”, “or”, “then”, “but”, “therefore, “so”, “whether … or”, or “neither … nor”. Moreover, some juxtaposed items appears without anything between them in special idiomatic constructions called binômes.
In English, the lack of any conjunction between listed attributes is stylistically marked, signaling looser, non-final listings and enumerations. Asyndetic coordination is commonly used with descriptive modifiers, specifically, those found in the attributive position (before nouns) rather than in the predicative position (after the verbs be, seem, etc.). Here is the striking opening sentence from Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, illustrating the asyndetic use of attributive modifiers:
It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
On the other hand, asyndetically connected predicatives in English are never strongly coordinative, conveying the sense of an afterthought as in a resumptive (or summative, or reformulating) appositive construction rather than a series of parallel items. As it happens, appositive constructions are easily mistaken for a pair of asyndetically linked items, with the line between those often being blurry, as illustrated below. It's not clear whether the predicatives below are parallel items or resumptive/reformulating appositives:
The noise had been so loud, so sharp. He sounded weary, hurt.
William Golding, The Pyramid Bernard Malamud, The Assistant
Without the conjunction, a descriptive list reflects the non-finalizing, fluid, changing subjectivity of the describer, who is not interested in creating a precise or comprehensive list of attributes. An asyndetic list may appear as if it can go on for as long as the describer wishes to continue.
While in English asyndetic linking has a clear sense of non-finality, this is not the case in Turkish. A listing in Turkish may remain asyndetic in any situation, regardless of whether the count of the listed items has been established to be precise or not:
Hüseyin Nazmi: “Gazeteleri, kâğıtları bırakayım, biraz gezelim,” dedi.
Hüseyin Nazmi said, “Let's leave these newspapers and papers, let's walk around a little.”
Halİt Ziya Uşaklıgil, Mai ve Siyah
Yolda, yıkılmış bir kulübeye, sönmüş bir ocağa rast geliyorlar.
On the way, they come across a destroyed hut and an extinguished furnace.
Ahmet Hikmet Müftüoğlu, Çağlayanlar
The structural constraints in flexibility of the canonical Turkish sentence are somewhat balanced off by the general stylistic preference for a looser and more fluid conjunction-less connection of constituents, the style referred to as asyndetic parataxis (coordination without using conjunctions).
Unlike a descriptive list, a pair or series of items in English tends to be syndetically connected. If the list is established to be final and precise, it must have a conjunction connecting the items, whereas in Turkish even precise lists are often asyndetic:
Bazı günler Nimet, ben atlarla Pınarbaşıпa giderdik.
Some days, Nimet and I would ride horses to Pınarbaşı.
R. Enis, Kılıcımı Sürüyorum
Yolun büyüğü, küçüğü yoktur.
There’s no path great or small.
Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Huzur
In rare instances, syndetic connections in Turkish may be reflected asyndetically in English, mainly due to the occasional discrepancy in interpreting paratactic and hypotactic attributive modifiers, as in the example below, uzun ve siyah kirpikler (long, black eyelashes):
Uzun ve siyah kirpiklerinin altında o mağrur tebessümü muhafazaya çalışan kederli gözleri(,) delikanlının üstünde dolaştıkça onu büsbütün şaşırtıyor ve manasızca etrafına bakınmaya ve susmaya sevk ediyordu.
Trying to hide that proud smile under her long, black eyelashes, her sad eyes, probing the young man and forcing him to avert his eyes to look around pointlessly while keeping silent, caught him completely off guard.
S. Ali, Şeytan
The constrained syntax of the Turkish sentence results in the recursive process of embedding of a grammatical structure within another grammatical structure. Such stacking of the same forms results in producing embedded-within-embedded, or self-embedded, structures. Subject to self-embedding are both dependent and independent constructions, including dependent subordinate clauses as well as independent items in a series, with comma used as a common connective, in addition to conjunctions:
İhtiyar ve tecrübeli Çingene karıları bildikleri afsunları okuyorlar, bütün iyi ve fena ruhları zavallı Atmaca’nın imdadına çağırıyorlardı.
Old and experienced Gypsy women were reciting the incantations they knew, calling all the good and evil spirits to help poor Atmaca.
Sabahattin Ali, “Değirmen”
Asyndetic parataxis can be combined with syndetic parataxis, through the use of the coordinating conjunction ve, when there is a danger of confusion, especially with stacked or embedded parallel items. Besides, based on my observations, the use of ve is more frequent in formal, official writing.
Different series may also be stacked next to each other, adjacent at the shared boundary, with only a comma marking it. The only way to distinguish between the items of the stacked series is the difference in their morphology and the punctuation used:
Bir köşede yeni yıkanmış, ütülenmiş çarşaflar, gömlekler vardı.
In one corner, there were freshly washed and ironed sheets and shirts.
Orhan Pamuk, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları
In Turkish, regardless of whether the list is final or not, constituents are more often simply placed next to each other, with a comma marking the boundary between them, including between a pair of items—unless the pairing has become lexicalized, or idiomatic, in which case no punctuation between them is used. Such lexicalized binary pairs are also found in English, with the telling difference from Turkish, though: English lexicalized pairs must be syndetically connected, with either and or or, while Turkish binary pairs are simply placed next to each other with no other indicator of the connection.
Lexicalized Repetitiveness: Asyndetic-Paratactic Binary Reduplications (Binômes/İkilemeler)
Both English and Turkish have lexicalized a number of paired, binary nouns, called binômes (although there are also binary pairs of adjectives and adverbs). Paired nouns are often rhyming, near-rhyming, alliterative, or reduplicative formations.
English has a long tradition of duplicating words, especially if they are Latin/French loanwords used in specialized areas of law and medicine. To prevent misunderstanding (and potentially legal liability), English writers would combine the loanword with its native equivalent, as in aid and abet, betwixt and between, let or hindrance, cease and desist, null and void, suffer and permit, etc.
As you can see, these are necessarily linked with a conjunction. In Turkish, however, the lexicalized binary expressions, ikilemeler, are simply juxtaposed as asyndetic-paratactic reduplicated terms that form a single idiomatic unit. To illustrate the difference between Turkish and English, compare the matching pairs in the table below:
karı koca husband and wife | gece gündüz day and night | aşağı yukarı more or less | tekrar tekrar time and again |
siyah beyaz black and white | ara sıra now and again | iyi kötü for better or worse | bir-iki one or two |
By juxtaposing two words, Turks can create an abstraction, a conceptual unit, whose specific components do not matter separately as much as when they are combined. Together they contribute to the categorical nature of the newly minted unit. This categorical property becomes apparent when the unit functions as a non-case-marked object in a sentence, e.g., ekmek peynir and kâğıt kalem, as shown below in the next two examples:
Öğleyin ekmek peynir yedim.
I had some bread and cheese at lunch time.
Kâğıt kalem çıkardım ve bir hamlede sanki hiç düşünmeden şunu yazıverdim...
I took out pen and paper, and in one sitting, without having to think, I wrote the following...
Orhan Pamuk, Benim Adım Kırmızı
Two other instances of such conceptualization are somewhat similar. The first one comes from Ahmet Altan’s En Uzun Gece. In a conversation about “honor killings” with a foreign protagonist visiting a Turkish village, who asks why some Turkish men kill their wives, the agha of the village explains using the reduplication kadın kız as a placeholder for any female ward under the man’s care:
“Lâkin kadınına kızına dokunulan bir adam, bana sorarsan, kadınını kızını değil, önce dokunanı, sonra da kendini vurmalı... O nasıl bir erkek olmalı ki, kadınına kızına dokunulduktan sonra, evladına kıydıktan sonra ben bir erim diye başı dik dolaşabilsin?”
“But, if you ask me, if someone has groped a man’s woman or daughter, instead of killing the woman or daughter, he should go and first shoot the groper and then himself... Because what kind of a man are you if you let your woman or daughter be groped?”
Ahmet Altan, En Uzun Gece
Halikarnas Balıkçısı, in one of his short stories, uses one common reduplication ana baba (parents) and one he seems to have created, kardeş kız, most probably to mean siblings and children:
Gitmeden önce ana babaya, kardeş kızana “allahaısmarladık” diyerek, onların yüreklerini oynatmayı gereksiz buldu.
He did not want to upset his parents, siblings, or children and decided to leave without saying goodbye.
Halikarnas Balıkçısı, “Denizin Çağırışı”
👉 The reduplications of synonymic entities or persons imply that individually such entities or persons are not as important as their aggregate, which is why the agha uses the imprecise, and generalizing, notion kadın instead of karı, eş, or hanım (a wife).
When combining binary items, on the other hand, as in the binary expression combining two adjectives (or adverbs) iyi kötü (literally meaning well, badly) in the sentence below, the collective sense of the expression conveys an approximation between its components; that is, something between well and badly is neither well nor badly, or it's somehow:
Eline kâğıt kalem alıp bir şeyler döktürebilen, bu döktürdüklerini de başkalarına iyi kötü okutabilen kişi, biraz olsun kurtulmuş sayılır bu hastalıktan.
Anyone who can pick up a pen and scribble something down—and somehow manage to convince others to read it—has been cured of this ailment, at least to some degree.
Orhan Pamuk, Kara Kitap
In another creative example, the author has reconceptualized the notion of “reading” as the binary expression A’lar B’ler (A’s and B’s):
Çünkü zaman yıldırım gibi geçiyor, çocuklar büyüyordu. Kız okula başladı, oğlan evde, gazetelerin A’larını B’lerini seçmeye.
Because time was passing like lightning, and children were growing up. Their daughter started school, and their son was at home, finding A’s and B’s in the newspapers.
T. Buğra, İbişin Rüyası
Asyndeton, combined with syndeton, can also be found in the names of organizations or organizational departments:
[Konuşma Dili Yazı Dili] İlişkileri ve Derleme Faaliyetleri
[Spoken] and [Written] Language Interactions and Compilation Efforts
Turks love reduplications, to the point of occasional excess and redundancy. Reduplications are so common that the same term may be expressed using several reduplicated expressions. For example, there are several paired terms expressing the same meaning of “approximately”: e.g., aşağı yukarı, şöyle böyle, olsa olsa, topu topu, hemen hemen.
Synonymic and near-synonymic reduplications are often hyperbolic and somewhat repetitive, with some used in negative expressions only: for example, elde avuçta (bir şey kalmadan) (with nothing left), eşi benzeri (olmayan) (unprecedented), saklısı gizlisi (olmayan) (openly), dertsiz tasasız (carefree), eğri büğrü (crooked), yersiz yurtsuz (vagrant), sormak soruşturmak (to ask around), bıkmak usanmak (to be tired of).
Many of the English idiomatic binômes, especially the idiomatic legalisms (for and against, tried and tested, etc.), are regarded excessive and archaic. In contrast, Turkish reduplicated phrases are numerous, being a part of every Turkish speaker's daily lexicon. Turkish paired expressions are in a perpetual state of becoming lexicalized, with new ones emerging regularly.
Binary Oppositions of the Mind & Language, and Body Rhythms
Judging by how comfortable Turkish language users are applying the asyndetic-paratactic style to connecting elements in sentences, including for duplications that invoke lexical reduplications, it may be reasonable to speculate that a reduplicating/pairing formula is immediately available to Turkish speakers as a tool for creating expressions. Moreover, the easily graspable rhythmic nature of such expressions, which makes them simple enough to remember and use, may be rooted in our physiology, namely, in our internal biological metronome measuring the rhythmic expand-contract intervals of our breathing lungs and pulsing heart.
Heart specialists have traditionally represented the healthy sounds of the human heart (produced by the alternating closures of two valve pairings) as a balanced two-part compound—lub-dub—marking the binary cardiac cycle. For us to be healthy, or to be simply alive, the alternating heartbeat must be perfectly aligned with the intermittent workings of our lungs. As the lungs alternate between inhales and exhales, they also participate in the production of our speech, providing the air needed to vibrate our vocal cords and the energy needed to move that air from the lungs. Because we need air to speak, we can speak only on exhale, and we continue speaking until we stop or run out of air.
The dependency of our speech on the limited physical capacity of our lungs and heart, expanding and contracting in unison with each other, is what ultimately accounts for the rhythmic, at times even musical, property of human speech, and specifically for the recurrent binary patterns found in speech. It's tempting to see the balancing effect of binary oppositions in almost everything in our lives. As chronic systematizers, we are built to seek recurrent patterns around us; we think and communicate through juxtapositions by establishing similarities and contrasting differences. Our language is organized in terms of binary oppositions (see below), which may also explain the habitualness in language of parallel grammatical forms, including rhythmic duplications and reduplications, typically consisting of repeated, synonymic, or oppositional notions.
in or out var mısın, yok musun | up and down aşağı yukarı, baştan aşağı | ebb and flow gelgit | inhale and exhale nefes al, nefes ver |
here and there orada burada | now and then arada sırada | open and close aç, kapat | birth and death doğma-ölme |
on and off kesik kesik | rise and fall iniş çıkış | come and go gel, git | good and evil iyi, kötü |
Inherent in the binary rhythm is the sense of balance, continuity, order, certainty, even finality, which may explain why Turkish language users do not feel the need to add in reduplications any clarifying or finalizing conjunction. Balanced asyndetic duplications can range from the syntactic pairings of binômes to more subtle oppositional pairings, which can be found in both Turkish fiction and nonfiction, as the many examples below illustrate (note that in English most of such pairings must be expressed syndetically):
Salona yürürken yukarı çıkmaya, çalışmaya karar verdi.
As he was walking to the living room, he decided to go upstairs and study.
Orhan Pamuk, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları
Hafızasında gerisi gelmeyen birkaç hayal vardı. Bunlardan biri, annesinin yola çıkar çıkmaz değişmesiydi. Artık o, kocasının ölüsü üzerinde ağlayan, sızlayan kadın değildi.
He had fragmented memories, one of which was the way his mother was transfigured on the exodus. No longer was she a wife who wept and moaned over her husband’s corpse.
Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Huzur
Ali Rıza Bey evvelâ şaşırdı; oğlunun da öteki çocukları gibi değiştiğine, bozulduğuna hükmetti.
Ali Rıza Bey was initially surprised; he concluded that his son had changed, got corrupted like his other children.
Reşat Nuri Güntekin, Yaprak Dökümü
Being a pronoun-dropping language, Turkish often omits (nulls) subjects in sentences if the subject is already expressed by the predicate's suffix. An object may also be omitted if it is repeated and has the same case marker. The common omission of sentential arguments results in the frequent pattern of duplicated predicates (in compound predicates), as seen in Pamuk's sentence below:
Mektubun bende olduğunu, okuduğumu öğrenince şakasını nasıl bulduğumu sordu, güldü.
When he found out that I had the letter and that I had read it, he asked me what I thought of his joke and laughed.
Orhan Pamuk, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları
This sentence has a common usage error in Turkish: a faulty omitted object (mektubu).
In the asyndetic pair of the verbs sordu and güldü, the subject is nulled, since it's inferable from the absence of predicate's suffix. In the asyndetic pair of the verbals olduğunu and okuduğu, the second verbal has no object, even though the verbal form is transitive (and requires an object). Its absence suggests that it's the same as the object of the first verbal in the pair, even though the case marker of the omitted object mektup would be different with okuduğu: mektubun bende olduğunu, mektubu okuduğumu öğrenince. Although technically such an omission is grammatically incorrect (constituting another prevalent usage issue in Turkish), it is a common occurrence not only in Turkish speech but also in literary Turkish writings, driven by the impulse to avoid repetitions at all costs. As long as the reader can unambiguously identify the referent from the context, any omission of an argument or possessor seems to be justifiable in contemporary Turkish, including the omission of indirect objects with three-place verbs (e.g., bana in the clause şakasını nasıl bulduğumu [bana] sordu or in the clause kestane şekeri [bana] ikram etti, in the last sentence of this section).
The sentence below has one syndetic series (with three items) and two asyndetic pairs, one of which is a pair of two verbs, aldı (took) and götürdü (took away). Represented as a pair of duplicated predicates, it is, in fact, the informally rephrased lexicalized verb composite alıp götürdü (took away):
[Borçlarım, borçlarımın faizi ve evlenme masrafları] [elimde avucumda] kalan birkaç parça malı [aldı, götürdü].
What property I had left went towards the wedding expenses and my debts.
Sabahattin Ali, Kürk Mantolu Madonna
The inclination to reduplicate things in Turkish is so strong that it can trigger the balancing linguistic process of delaying (backgrounding) to the post-verb area of a constituent that can be guessed from the context (for example, the topic). For example, the object Hatçe is delayed to the post-verb area to bring the verbs al (take) and git (go) next to each other, thus evoking the common idiomatic expression başını alıp gitmek (to go away, to leave):
Sen, al git Hatçe’yi.
[Take] Hatche and [go].
Y. Kemal, İnce Memed
Kestane şekeri ikram etti, yedim.
He offered me candied chestnuts, which I ate.
Orhan Pamuk, Cevdet Bey ve Oğulları
On the other hand, as I mentioned above, the process of duplication is aligned with the mechanism of pronominal omission (nulling) of any inferable or shared arguments or possessors. The two independent clauses that constitute the second sentence both have their subjects omitted, o and ben, since they can be inferred from the predicates' suffixes (or the lack thereof). Both clauses also share the object kestane şekeri (candied chestnuts), which is, therefore, omitted at its second mention. The first clause has also an elided indirect object, bana, which must be deemed unambiguously inferable from the context and, therefore, omissible.
🔔 The curious thing about Turkish sentences is that the seemingly extreme omission of valuable arguments and possessors can go hand-in-hand with addition of excessive optional modifiers.
Repetitive Duplications in Turkish Fiction
The preference for linking constituents without a conjunction and the morphologically rhythmic structuring of reduplications may explain why there are so many duplicated, reduplicated, rhyming and almost rhyming paired modifiers and binary expressions in Turkish. The easiness of juxtaposing elements in Turkish sentences without having to indicate the nature of the connection also contributes to the apparent overload of reduplications in contemporary Turkish, with some repetitiveness becoming inevitable.
In fact, persistently repetitive and, at times, redundant use of synonymic and near-synonymic duplicated expressions is one of the common usage issues in literary Turkish. The issue is pervasive, and repetitive expressions can be found in the works of major Turkish authors:
Küçük hanım, biraz da hiç uğramadığı, görmediği bizim sınıfta büyüdü.
The young lady was, you might say, raised in our very classroom, though she never entered it.
Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Huzur
Arife Hanım’ın ikameti evde uzadıkça, ta çocukluğundan beri tanıdığı o keskin hiddet çoyalır, büyürdü.
As Arife the gossip’s visit to the house dragged on, Sabire’s rage, which Arife had known since childhood, mounted.
Ahmed Hamdi Tanpınar, Huzur
Mehmet ile ihtiyar yazarın görüşmelerinde birbirlerinin gözlerinden her şeyi anladıklarını biliyorum. Mehmet onu aramış, araştırmış.
I know that when Mehmet and the old writer talked, they understood everything in each other’s eyes.
Mehmet had been looking for him and had looked him up.
Orhan Pamuk, Yeni Hayat
Oğlu Ruşen her gün babasının elinden tutar, yede yede eve götürür, evden getirir, onun yıkılmış, ezilmiş, kırılmış gönülcüğünü elinden geldiğince hoş ederdi.
Every day, his son Ruşen would hold his father’s hand and pick him up from home, then walk him back home, and try to repair his father’s broken, shattered heart as gently and lovingly as he could.
Yaşar Kemal, Üç Anadolu Efsanesi
Çerkes dadıyı da makinist oğlu yani onlara, gece gündüz anlayacakları dille uğraşmışlar, bıkmadan, usanmadan, kızıp darılmadan söylemişlerdi.
To the Circassian nanny and the machinist's son (to them, that is), they tried to explain it day and night in a language they could understand, without a sign of boredom, anger, or offence.
K. Tahir, Esir Şehrin İnsanları
Muallim olarak geldiğim şehir(,) Orta Anadolu’nun bozkırlarında bir cilt yarası gibi intizamsız, karışık ve kirli uzanıyor, yayılıyordu.
The city that I came to as a teacher was spread in the steppes of Central Anatolia as irregular, confused, and dirty like a skin wound.
S. Ali, Bir Skandal
Esasen Hakkı Celis’in arzu ettiği şey, bu sofradan bir an evvel uzaklaşmak, kaçmaktı; hemen ayağa kalktı.
Essentially, what Hakkı Celis wanted was to get away from this table as soon as possible. He stood up immediately.
Yakup Kadrı Karaosmanoğlu, Kiralık Konak
Selim, sevdiği, âşık olduğu, beğendiği bir erkekti, onun kıskanılmaya layık olduğuna inanıyordu ama Taner beğenmediği, sevmediği, hatta kızdığı, zekâsını küçümsediği, kaba bulduğu biriydi.
Selim was a man she loved and admired, believing he was worthy of her jealousy. Taner, however, was someone for whom she felt no love but anger, a rude man, an insult to her intelligence.
Ahmet Altan, En Uzun Gece
Not all repetitive modifiers are morphological duplications. In the sentences below, the modifiers yorgun (tired) and bitkin (exhausted) or çaba isteyen (requiring effort) and zor (difficult) duplicate each other semantically. And so is the part sivri iki nokta (pointy dots) of the modifier siyah sivri iki noktaya benzeyen (resembling two black pointy dots), since dots are already characterized by being pointy:
Yataktan çok yorgun bitkin kalktı.
He rose from his bed, tired, exhausted.
Yaşar Kemal, İnce Memed
Çaba isteyen zor bir işti bu yaptığı ama.
What he did was a job that required effort, though.
Osman Şahin, Mahşer
Köylü, siyah sivri iki noktaya benzeyen mini mini gözler.
The tiny eyes of a peasant, like two black pointy dots.
Ö. Seyfettin, Beyaz Lale
Linguists call such repetitive duplications (used in connection with the same constituent) tautological.
Repetitive Duplications in Turkish Nonfiction
Redundant “padding” and repetitive duplications are very common in nonfiction writing, with the main culprits being educational and reference textbooks, books on criticism, self-help books, opinion writing in online/printed newspaper and magazine columns, news analysis, social/political commentary, and promotional writing, including publicity/publisher’s blurbs (for a book or a movie), PR releases, and other marketing materials, as illustrated by the examples below (note the highlighted items).
The first example from a self-help book is a motherload of redundant duplications:
Hatta belki kimsesiz, yapayalnız bir seyyah olduğunu söyleyeceksindir kendine. Hiç kimsenin seni olduğun gibi, tam ve bütün olarak göremediğinden, anlayamadığından, fark edemediğinden yürürken bazen çok yalnız hissedeceksindir kendini. Belki çekip gitme arzusu, ortalardan kaybolma isteği, her şeyi bırakıp gitme ihtiyacı doğacak içine. Bilileri seni arayıp bulsun, görsün, fark etsin, anlasın diye kaybolmak isteyeceksindir.
Maybe you will even tell yourself that you are a [lonely], [solitary] traveler. Sometimes, you may feel very lonely when walking on the street because no one [sees you], [understands you], [notices you] as you are, as a [whole], [complete] person. Maybe you will feel [the desire to walk away], [the desire to disappear], [the need to leave everything behind]. You will want to get lost so that others can [find you], [see you], [notice you], [understand you].
Hakan Mengüç, Sen Yola Çık Yol Sana Görünür
Other culprits are opinion column writers and other public opinion makers, cultural analysts, political commentators and ideologs, who do not shy away from adding some drama in their writing by using emphatic (and redundant) reduplications. Frequent repetitiveness is a stylistic choice of such writing. The excerpt below, for example, uses many words that say the same thing:
Kimi, hangisini, niçin seçmeliyiz? Seçmedeki ölçümüz ne olacak? Hangi tercihimiz doğru olur? Seçme kabiliyetimizi doğruya/hakka kullanmak sorumluluğumuz var. (…) Parti tercihi yön, yol, düzen, medeniyet, zihniyet, reçete tercihidir. Sadece araç seçimi değildir; yol, menzil, şoför, rehber, veli, vekil seçimidir de. Yol doğru, rehber bilge/ehil, emin, adil, dürüst, müşfik, araç sağlam olmalı, yalan söylememeli, aldatmamalı, aldanmamalı da.
Whom should we elect, which one, and why? What criteria will we follow? Which choice would be the right one? We have a responsibility to make the right choice. […] Electing a party is akin to deciding on the direction, path, plan, civilization, mindset, and recipe. It is not just about deciding on a vehicle; it is also about deciding on the [road], [destination], driver, guide, guardian, and delegate. The path must be right; the guide must be wise, competent, safe, fair, honest, and compassionate; the vehicle must be solid; no lies are allowed, nor deception.
Bahaddin Elçi, “Ne sağ ne sol, ne cumhur ne millet, tek seçenek” from Millî Gazete
The author adds excessive “padding” to the simple phrase doğru seçim yapmak/ doğru seçmek turning it into the cumbersome seçme kabiliyetini doğruya/hakka kullanmak:
doğruya ... hakka OR doğruya ... hakka
Seçme kabiliyetimizi doğruya/hakka kullanmak sorumluluğumuz var.
lit. We have a responsibility to use our ability to choose correctly and fairly.
Bahaddin Elçi, “Ne sağ ne sol, ne cumhur ne millet, tek seçenek” from Millî Gazete
Revised:
Doğru seçimi yapma sorumluluğumuz var.
We have a responsibility to make the right choice.
This, of course, can be edited even further, since the entire point of the original sentence is just these three words:
Doğru seçim yapmalıyız.
We must make the right choice.
In another example, the modifiers iyi tanınan (well-known) and meşhur (famous) are too similar to be in the same sentence:
iyi tanınan ... meşhur OR iyi tanınan ... meşhur
Venüs’ün yüzey şekillerine isimleri verilecek kişilerin son üç yıldan önce ölmüş iyi tanınan, meşhur kadınlar olması gerekiyor.
Those after whom the Venusian landforms will be named should be the well-known women who died more than three years ago.
S. Evren, “Venüs’ün Kadınları”, Atlas Dergisi
The next two examples from an educational text illustrate tautological duplications:
son ... bitim OR son ... bitim
Sonu, bitimi ifade eden nokta elbette ki bütün noktalama işaretlerinin hem anası hem de isim babasıdır.
The period, which conveys the end, is of course both the mother of all punctuation marks and the father whose name they all carry.
Hadi Önal, Noktalama İşaretlerinin Dili
anlam kazanması ... anlaşılması OR anlam kazanması ... anlaşılması
Virgül, yazının âdeta anahtarıdır. Onsuz yazı karmakarışık bir hâl alır. Okuyucuya; “Dur! Hele bir nefes al!” dedirten bu işaret aynı zamanda metnin anlam kazanmasına ve anlaşılmasına vesile olur.
Comma is the key to any text. Without it, writing becomes chaotic. This sign makes the reader say, “Stop and take a breath!”, making the text meaningful.
Hadi Önal, Noktalama İşaretlerinin Dili
Promotional blurbs (on book jackets) and book prefaces are also a rich source of redundancy in writing, even in the writings of the best Turkish authors:
sizde, içinizde bir yerlerde OR sizde, içinizde bir yerlerde
O hikâyelerin sizde, içinizde bir yerlerde bunca zaman bir saklı su gibi beklemiş olduğunu fark eder[siniz].
You realize that those stories have been waiting inside you for a long time, like a spring in waiting.
Murathan Mungan, Önsöz, Erkeklerin Hikayeleri (Murathan Mungan’ın Seçtikleriyle)
Another sentence from a blurb on the jacket of Mario Levi's Karanlık Çökerken Neredeydiniz:
masumiyeti, saflığı OR masumiyeti, saflığı
Masumiyeti, saflığı kaybetmemiş o kuşağın romantik insanlarının politik nedenlerle farklı ülkelere gitmek zorunda kalışları konu ediliyor romanda.
The novel follows the story of the emigration of that generation of idealists who, nevertheless, managed to preserve their innocence.
From the book jacket blurb for Mario Levi's Karanlık Çökerken Neredeydiniz, published by Doğan Kitap
hudutsuz ... sonsuzdur OR hudutsuz ... sonsuzdur
Zira tabiatın güzelliği hudutsuz, sonsuzdur.
For the beauty of nature knows no bounds.
A. Ş. Hisar, Boğaziçi Mehtapları
bilinen ... tanınmış OR bilinen ... tanınmış
Bilim, sanat, felsefe, siyaset vb. alanlarda bilinen, tanınmış kişilerle yapılan görüşmelerde ele alınan orijinal konularla ilgili sorulara verilen cevapları okuyucuya aktarmak üzere kaleme alınan yazılara röportaj denir.
Interviews are texts written to convey to the reader the answers given to questions about original subjects discussed in interviews with well-known people in the fields of science, art, philosophy, politics, etc.
Türk Dili, Yazılı ve Sözlü Anlatım, ed. Nurettin Demir and Emine Yılmaz
araştırmalar ... incelemeler OR araştırmalar ... incelemeler
Her birinin bu yazın türündeki etkinliği üstüne araştırmalar, incelemeler yapmaya değer.
It is worth doing research on the effectiveness of each of them in this literary genre.
Azra Erhat, Sevgi Yönetimi
If used to convey an emotion or to amplify the meaning of the repeated words, potentially excessive modifiers may be forgiven in the literary or informal context. However, in formal, technical, and nonfiction writing, the goal is almost the opposite—that is, to swiftly get down to the main point using precise and neutral language.
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