The genitive case with postpositions in Turkish

Abstract

There is a diverse set of postpositions in Turkish that take genitive marked complements. The genitive case found on these postpositional complements is idiosyncratic, suggesting that it is a lexical case rather than a structural one (Ozt ¨ urk ¨ & Taylan 2016; Satik 2021; Kornfilt 1985; Baker 2015). The lexical genitive case exhibits distinctive behavioral patterns that we do not observe in the structural genitive case. That is, it is only overt on bare pronominals; otherwise, it is zero marked. The overt form of the lexical genitive case is syncretic with the structural genitive case. Through an analysis of these behaviors, we explore the relationship between the lexical and the structural genitive case.