A morphosyntactic analysis of the Turkish inflectional system

• Published in: Glossa (London) Vol. 10; no. 1; pp. 1 - 50
• Main Author: Senturia, Isabella
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Open Library of Humanities 01.08.2025; Ubiquity Press
• Subjects: Clitics; Compositionality; Distributed morphology; Grammatical agreement; Grammatical number; Inflection (Morphology); Morphology; Morphosyntax; Paradigms; Person; Research Article; Syntactic analysis; Syntax; Turkish language; Distributed Morphology; Syntax; Syncretism; Morphosyntax; Turkish; Clitics
• ISSN: 2397-1835; 2397-1835
• DOI: 10.16995/glossa.18721

This paper explores the cross-linguistically long-attested dichotomy between 1st and 2nd person on the one hand, and 3rd on the other, in the case of Turkish verbal inflection. Motivated by both syntactic and morphological data, I decompose pronouns and verbal inflectional morphology and claim that 3rd person in Turkish does not have person features the way that 1st and 2nd person do. I propose a syntactic analysis for person verbal inflection: a clitic-doubling account in the case of 1st and 2nd person, and in the case of third person, that what looks like person/number agreement is really zero-number agreement coupled with cliticization. Along with this, I discuss the morphological decomposition of four different person inflection categories, giving the vocabulary items and insertion rules underlying the syncretisms across the two nominal and two verbal categories within the framework of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993; Embick 2015).