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This study argues that in Pazar Laz, an endangered South-Caucasian language spoken in Turkey, all eventive verbal predicates, including both unergatives and unaccusatives, pattern as transitives syntactically, involving a subject and an object position. Thus, there are no syntactic differences between transitives, unergatives, and unaccusatives. The chapter argues that this pattern correlates with the voice system in the language. While it lacks the voice phenomena associated with passives, middles, and anticausatives, Pazar Laz exhibits a three-way voice system involving Initiator (Actor) Voice, Undergoer (Object) Voice, and Active Impersonal Voice, which yield transitive constructions retaining both the subject and the object positions in syntax. The voice system is shown to be in line with Pazar Laz being a very conservative example of Initiation-language à la Ritter & Rosen (2000), who present a typology of languages, depending on whether the language defines an event based on its initial bound or its terminal bound.

This chapter investigates the syntactic properties of the prominent possessor constructions in Turkish. Possessors of possessive phrases become prominent only in a set of well-defined constructions, namely, from within an adverbial clause, typically containing a body part idiom. These idioms have the structure NP-POSS V, where N is a noun of inalienable possession, V is an unaccusative verb, and the idiom itself is paraphraseable as a psych-verb. The chapter analyses the syntactic structure of these idioms and proposes that the subject position in the adverbial clause is occupied by PRO. PRO is in the c-command domain of the matrix subject and is the locus of the experiencer of the unaccusative verb. The possessor is coindexed with this experiencer via its morphosyntactic features.

This study examines agent incorporation, which is a highly productive phenomenon observed in transitive and unergative constructions in Turkish. We account for this piece of data through a pseudoincorporation analysis which unifies both theme and agent incorporation under the same structure unlike the previous head-incorporation analyses. We suggest that as pseudo-incorporation does not involve head nouns but NPs, it is exempt from the constraints that govern head-movement and the choice of theta-roles for incorporated heads under head-incorporation, and thus it is technically compatible with the incorporation of any argument, including agents. #