Decomposing Turkish Third Person Possessives: A Nanosyntactic Approach

Abstract

This paper aims to show that the final n in Turkish third person possessive suffixes is a distinct morpheme, and therefore, these suffixes should be further decomposed as -(s)I-n and -lArI-n. This decomposition finds itself strong evidence from Turkish pronominals. Particularly, it has been observed that Turkish pronouns, like demonstratives, always surface with what is termed as pronominal n in the literature (Ergin 1977; Sultanzade 2014). I argue that the -n that follows third person possessives and the pronominal n are the same morpheme. For this, Eryılmaz & Demirok (2025) provide an analysis in the framework of Distributed Morphology. Building on that work, I argue that Nanosyntax is a framework that can explain the data more easily than Distributed Morphology and provide a detailed analysis in the Nanosyntactic framework.