Morphosyntax and Phonology of Agreement in Turkish

Abstract

This article offers a new morphosyntactic account of subject agreement in the Turkish verbal domain. The account is based on a combination of well-known, novel, and overlooked observations about the distribution and prosody of verbal agreement. In Turkish, when certain morphosyntactic requirements are met and the verb is focused, as in fragment answers with ellipsis, the agreement morpheme can be parsed inside or outside of the prosodically prominent part of the verbal domain that constitutes the fragment answer. I claim that this optionality is a reflex of how the morphemes that constitute the verbal domain are postsyntactically concatenated. In particular, I argue that an agreement morpheme either lowers together with its host (full lowering) or is stranded when its host lowers (partial lowering). In full lowering, agreement is contained within the prominent part of the verbal domain, whereas in partial lowering, agreement falls outside of this prominence domain. I also show that the prosodic variability in question is observed only when two related noncanonical realizations of agreement are possible: medial agreement and double agreement. The Vocabulary Insertion rules that I postulate for the subject-agreement paradigms of the Turkish verbal domain capture the acceptable cases of medial and double agreement and successfully predict in which environments medial agreement is optional and in which environments it is obligatory. This work stems from research carried out with Aslı G€ oksel between 2012 and 2019; its origins can be traced to a discussion in G€ oksel 2010 of the interesting prosodic behavior of agreement in Turkish (originally observed by Seb€ uktekin 1984). Aslı G€ oksel and I have presented phonological and morphophonological analyses of the data discussed here in a variety of venues, such as the ninth Mediterranean Morphology Meeting (2013), LingDay 2013 (Bo gazic ßi University), the workshop The Word and the Morpheme (Humboldt University of Berlin, 2016), and ComSyn (Leiden University, 2017). I thank each of the audiences for their questions and comments. This work has also benefited from comments and suggestions made by Jonathan Bobaljik, Lisa Cheng, James Griffiths, Barıs ß Kabak, Anik o Lipt ak, Jason Merchant, Andrew Nevins, and two anonymous referees. This research was funded by the Dutch Research Council.

Prosodic Rephrasing and Violations of the Phase Impenetrability Condition

“…The first is non-recursivity (NON-REC), which precludes recursive prosodic structures. 6 If recursive phonological structures arise from mapping from syntax, these structures are "repaired" so that NON-REC is satisfied (Güneş 2015(Güneş , 2021. This repair effect is illustrated in (6).…”

“…If the Turkish inflected verb contains two or more Tense/Aspect/Mood (TAM) markers and is focused, then it is necessarily parsed into two prosodic chunks, with the leftmost chunk being perceived as bearing the sentence-level nuclear prominence (Sebüktekin 1984;Kornfilt 1996;Göksel 2010). In Turkish, each linearly non-initial TAM marker is hosted by a copular verb, which is often phonologically null, but which is nonetheless treated as the "trigger" or "cause" for the observed prosodic chunking when the verb is focused (Kornfilt 1996;Yu 2000, 2005;Enç 2004;Kelepir 2001Kelepir , 2003Kelepir , 2007Kahnemuyipour and Kornfilt 2010;Güneş 2020aGüneş , 2021. In (21), the participle verb domain görmüş 'see-PERF' is the only domain that can be parsed as the nucleus; compare (22a) to (22b).…”

Extended Classification of the Main Grammatical Frames for Speaking verbs

“…Speak. (12) [I do not speak that every evolution is progressive] MC (13) [I speak that I have seen with my father] MC (14) [He warmly spoke that I smiled a bit from my tears] MC (15) [He spoke that a preceding call was made before the presidential] MC (16)…”

“…The three sentences are marked with one aspect; (12) is actual perpective (present); ( 14) is actual perpective (past); ( 15) is actual perpective past (the subordinate verb is in passive form). ( 13), ( 16), (17) are marked with two distinct aspects; actual perpective (past) as a head followed by previous perpective (past) in (13); actual perpective (present) in (16); and irrealis status in (17).…”

“…The main implication of syntactic analysis refers to the constituent series of a sentence that is constructed by phrases and word combination by means of grammatical operation [10]. The implementation of syntactic analysis is also applied to different languages; a phrasal category and properties of the noun phrase in Hungarian [11] and verb domain of subject agreement in Turkish [12]. These previous studies have released the advances of syntactic analysis ranging from phrases, clauses, sentences adapted by semantic representation.…”