Abstract:

The reporting clauses convey thoughts or statements in different forms with quotations included. In traditional grammar, these sentences are classified under nested compound sentence structures, and the quotations and metaphrases correspond to the reported clause. The reporting clause is the whole sentence that includes the reported clause combined with the predicate of the main sentence. The present study claims that it is immensely possible to trace the examples of reporting clauses in the same order and comprising a differing number of components through the historical texts in Turkish. It mainly focuses on and aims to point out the similar structures constituting reporting clauses in Turkish. For this purpose, various examples of reporting clauses in two different word order patterns such as object-verb, subject-verb-object are extracted and examined from three widely known historical texts in Turkish: Kutadgu Bilig, Dede Korkut Stories, and The Campaign Narrative of Tiryaki Hasan Pasha. Undoubtedly, the word order of reporting clauses in Turkish is not restricted to these two orders. In order to draw a more vivid depiction of the phenomenon this paper is based on the multiple forms of reporting clauses, yet limits itself to these two word orders. As a result, this study provides a detailed description of word order phenomena of similar structures in the aforementioned sources, which were written in different epochs and fields of Turkish literature. In this sense, this study serves to improve our understanding of the broader range of issues around word order in reporting clauses.

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