The realization of agreement in the Turkish verbal domain

Abstract

Different realizations of the agreement morpheme in the Turkish verbal domain have been argued to signal differences in the underlying syntax. Concretely, Kornfilt (1996) has proposed that verbs with agreement markers from the z-paradigm contain a silent copula whereas those with k-paradigm agreement do not. This paper is concerned with yet another, understudied agreement paradigm – the reduced z-paradigm – and investigates how it fits into the dichotomy posited by Kornfilt. I find hat the new forms have mixed properties and do not pattern clearly with either of the two older sets of verbs. In response, I propose that the syntactic distinction between verbs that do and verbs that do not contain a copula is being levelled in diachronic development, and I develop an analysis of how contemporary grammars encode the distinct properties of the three sets of verbs.