This dissertation investigates the evidence for shift-induced interference in the case-marking system of Turkic languages. Through comparative analysis, it demonstrates that the range of meanings and functions expressed by case markers in modern Turkic languages, such as Uzbek, Turkish, and Kazak, in many ways differs from that of their earliest documented reflexes in Old Turkic texts, and that these differences were precipitated by both internal and external mechanisms of linguistic change. Moreover, it shows that many functions currently expressed by case markers in the modern languages were originally expressed by different means, and that many functions not expressed by case markers in early Old Turkic, but now expressed by such forms in the modern languages, exhibit remarkable similarity in meaning and distribution to case markers of Modern Persian and other Iranian languages.; As a result, this study represents the first attempt of its kind to document diachronic innovations in Turkic case-marking patterns and to correlate these innovative patterns with possible source patterns in the Iranian languages with which they were historically in contact. It is argued, by means of concrete descriptive analysis and abstract generalizations of binary case features, that the crosslinguistic similarity of many case-marking functions in Turkic and Iranian languages is in all likelihood the result of the indirect transfer of case-marking patterns from Iranian languages.; Finally, comparative and crosslinguistic studies of this sort not only contribute to our understanding of how different case-marking systems interact in situations of language contact, but they also help to improve our knowledge of language universals by exploring the range of possible case features encountered in the case-marking systems of different languages. Thus, the findings obtained in this study, in conjunction with those of similar investigations, should eventually enable us to determine the natural classes of case features in human language.
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