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Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 235–262

Variability in the realization of agreement in Turkish

A morphotactic account

| Leiden University & University of Tübingen
Subject agreement in Turkish usually appears verb-finally. However, in certain cases agreement may appear non-finally. Furthermore, in certain dialects, and in colloquial speech, agreement may appear both finally and non-finally, yielding doubling. Previous accounts do not consider double agreement, and therefore are explanatorily inadequate. This paper proposes an account in which medial agreement is derived via reduplicating a string of morphemes that includes agreement, followed by deletion of some of the duplicate or original morphemes. While medial agreement involves reduplication plus deletion of one of the occurrences of agreement, I claim that double agreement involves reduplication but without deletion of the base or the reduplicant of agreement. My account is an adapted version of the morphological metathesis accounts that were proposed for double agreement in Spanish (see Mare 2018 for an overview).
Keywords: deletion, morphotactics, morphosyntax, displacement, reduplication, subject agreement, Turkish, variability
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Distribution of subject agreement in the Turkish verbal domain
  • 3.Güneş (2020): Agr as a dissociated morpheme
  • 4.Turkish medial/double Agr via Generalized Reduplication
    • 4.1Generalized Reduplication in the previous literature
    • 4.2Generalized Reduplication applied to Turkish Agr
    • 4.3Restricting the application of GR in the Turkish verbal domain
  • 5.Why GR in Turkish?
  • 6.Summary
  • Acknowledgment
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.09gun
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Güneş, Güliz
2021. Morphosyntax and Phonology of Agreement in Turkish. Syntax 24:2 ► pp. 143 ff. DOI logo

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