International Journal of Humanities and Social Science Vol. 1 No. 19; December 2011 244 EXPRESSING THE FUTURITY IN TURKISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE Assist. Prof. Dr. Türkay Bulut Halic University Faculty of Science and Letters English Translation Department Istanbul-Turkey Abstract The central aim of this study is to elucidate how adult native speakers of English studying Turkish as a second language perceive and produce the primary future markers in their interlanguage. Specifically, we have investigated how future time references in English are transferred, and how the differences marked by will, be going to, aorist and the present progressive are perceived in Turkish. The question stems from the point that Turkish is marked in the sense that verbs are inflected for the future tense (-(y)AcAk suffix); whereas, in English, morphologically speaking, we cannot talk about a future tense since there is no inflectional ending. The findings revealed that the participants demonstrated more sensitivity to pragmatic constraints rather than morphosyntactic features. Keywords- English, Interlanguage, Simple Future Tense, Turkish 1. INTRODUCTION Since 1980s, the effects of the mother tongue (L1) on the second language (L2) acquisition have been investigated in various linguistic levels such as phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and the like. It is generally believed that adult L2 learners find morpholexical correspondences in L2 to those in their L1, basing on the semantic meaning or grammatical function. They first discover and then form a mental representation for a specific construction when exposed to L2 input. They engage in the way features of the L2 are brought together as lexical items while constructing the L2 grammar (Slabakova, 2009; Montrul & Yoon, 2009). In White’s words, “L2 learners will sometimes have to associate existing L1 features with different lexical items, or a new class of lexical items, in the L2” (2009, p. 174). In line with Lardiere (2009), we strongly believe that acquiring a second language is a process of finding out the way the lexical items of L2 are brought together. During this process, L2 acquirers remap their L1 features into those of L2. To investigate this assumption, we focus on how adult native English speakers acquire the interpretation of the future tense in L2 Turkish. We believe that the participants will figure out how the future tense is realized, which is assembled differently in English and Turkish. 2. FUTURITY IN ENGLISH AND TURKISH There has been a long debate whether English has a future tense or not. Morphologically speaking, there is no future tense in English due to the absence of inflection on the verb (for more detailed discussions, see Comrie, 1985; 1989; Dahl,1985; Declerck, 1991; Anderson, 1992; Bergs, 2010). The question should be whether we refer to a morphological class or a semantic one when we define the term “tense”. Sezer (2001) defines tense as a syntactic category which contains affixes (or clitics) indicating tense, aspect, or mood. In some languages, as in English, there is no way to express the futurity morphologically; in others, as Bergs (2010) puts forward, there are future morphemes “as in Latin (-b-) or Turkish (-eceg-)” (p.217). According to Comrie (1985), future time reference and mood are closely related. That is to say, we use modals to express futurity due to the frequent combination of present meaning and the future. Therefore, it is hard to find an answer to the question what a future tense is; however, from morphological perspective, Turkish or French gets more future-tense-points than English. What we should bear in mind that tense is deictic in the sense that there is a relationship between the occurrence of the tense and a specific reference time. _______________ Assist. Prof. Dr. Turkay Bulut has been the chairperson of the translation department at Halic University since 2006. Her major study field is Linguistics, specifically second language acquisition and contrastive grammar.