Head Movement, Suspended Affixation, and the Turkish Clausal Spine

Abstract

Previous work has shown that Turkish has two structurally different ways of forming predicates with a range of effects for phonological stress, the selection of verbal suffixes, and particle placement (Hankamer 2008; Kelepir 2001; Kornfilt 1996; Zanon 2014). I present evidence drawn from a pilot study of a previously unnoticed difference between these predicate types: In vP-sized or larger coordinated phrases which realize a single sentencefinal predicate, verbal predicates are highly degraded when the person features on the conjuncts’ subjects mismatch, while participial predicates are relatively acceptable under the same conditions. Building on Kelepir (2001) & Zanon (2014)’s work on head-movement in Turkish predicates, I argue that gapping generates these strings from different sized coordinations, and explains the grammatical degradation split observed in the pilot study if we assume a more stringent identity requirement in Turkish gapping than we do for English.