The morphology of affix sharing in Turkish

Abstract

This paper analyses the phenomenon of Suspended Affixation (SA) which refers to a situation in coordinated constructions when affixes on the final conjunct have scope over all the non-final conjuncts. The main goal of this paper is to look at the structure of SA for Noun Compound Coordination and to find out how pl and poss suffixes behave regarding suspension. Previous studies have shown that in N and NP coordination poss cannot be suspended leaving pl on the non-final conjunct. This study tests the suspendability of poss in the context of Noun Compound coordination. Since SA seems to represent gradient judgment data two acceptability judgment studies were conducted to find out the (un)grammaticality of Noun Compound constructions. The results show that pl and poss suffixes cannot be suspended for independent reasons. The suspendability of poss does not depend on the presence/absence of pl in the structure due to its structural position. This article proposes an analysis of SA in N and NP coordination which represents a combination of two approaches on SA already proposed in literature and is based on the idea of Parallel Merge proposed by Citko (2005). SA in N and NP coordination is considered to be a coordination of fully inflected conjuncts where the inflections are parallel-merged with two conjuncts (final and non-final). I show that due to the structure of Noun Compound coordination constructions, pl and poss cannot be parallel-merged because of a minimality condition: a non-final conjunct has to be a Minimal Morphological Word.