Jaklin Kornfilt

Local And Long-Distance Reflexives In Turkish

Turkish has two types of reflexives: a bound morpheme, which is a verbal suffix, and a free morpheme. This chapter introduces the two main types of morphologically free reflexives. It discusses the differences between these two types. Then a question is raised about the nature of the inflected reflexive. Two possibilities are considered in the chapter: (1) that this element might be a Long Distance (LD)-reflexive and (2) that this element might be a pronominal. The chapter then discusses various approaches to account for that hybrid nature, and the properties of bare reflexives and distinguishes between a narrative stylistic level, where these elements are pronouns of empathy, versus a standard stylistic level, where the same elements are genuine syntactic, local anaphors. It finally illustrates complex, reduplicated reflexives and shows that they are strictly local. Keywords: anaphor; free morpheme; Long Distance (LD) reflexive; Pronoun; Turkish; verbal suffix

NP-Movement and “Restructuring”

In this paper, I shall describe a construction in Turkish which seems to involve a non-local application of an otherwise local process: NP-movement of an embedded object to matrix subject position. The construction in question involves a small number of subject control verbs and their infinitival complements.

Sounds Are Not Equal, but Nor is All Silence

This paper has three aims: 1. To show that two types of silent elements, small pro and PRO, have different syntactic properties (at least in certain languages, exemplified here by Turkish); 2. Where in a given syntactic context either an anaphoric or a pronominal element could potentially show up, the anaphoric element is preferred, irrespective of whether these elements are phonologically realized or not. The second point has also been made for English and French by Bouchard (1983) and (1985), under the label “Elsewhere Principle (EP). Bouchard’s proposal, based on the notion of “related construction” for the application of the EP, will be reduced to “identical construction”, at least for Turkish. Partee’s (1975) “only-test” will be used to support a characterization of PRO as a silent element whose features are different from those of (straightforward) pronouns, in being anaphoric. 3. A rather functionalistic principle of laziness, dubbed “Avoid Pronoun” in Chomsky (1981), which imposes the choice of PRO over an overt pronoun when either element is possible in a given syntactic context, also plays a role in determining certain instances of ill-formedness, especially where the EP has nothing to say.

Typological aspects of phrasal compounds in English, German, Turkish and Turkic

Abstract This paper discusses the properties of phrasal compounds in English, German, Turkish and Sakha, a Turkic language. Two questions are addressed: 1. What is the formal status of elements building (phrasal) compounds? 2. How can we distinguish compounds from phrasal forms? A number of traditional definitions and criteria are discussed, and the result is that they do not suffice to properly account for compounds, let alone phrasal compounds. The languages under discussion are investigated and compared. The result is that in English, German and Turkish tight semantic relations exist between the phrasal non-head and head, but in Turkish additional structural restrictions apply, (especially in reference to the (non)-argument status of the head) which may be due to the rich morphology of this language. The study on Sakha reveals that some phrasal compound types are similar to the Turkish types, without being identical to them.