Figure and ground reflexives in Turkish

Abstract

After controlling for phonologically conditioned homophony, it is shown that Turkish has two distinct suffixes marking verbal reflexives that have distinct syntactico-semantic properties: -Il is syncretic with the passive and anticausative, and derives intransitive figure reflexives (Wood 2014); -In is not syncretic with the passive and anticausative, and derives ground reflexives, some of which have transitive uses. Goal phrases are compatible with some ground reflexives, as the reduced argument is not the location as a whole, but the DP at the bottom of an articulated locational structure (Svenonius 2006, 2008).