Syntactic Positions of Turkish Bare NPs The View from Aspect and Prosody

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to show that internal arguments of verbs in Turkish do not uniformly occur in the complement position of the verb (contra e.g. Perlmutter 1978, 1989). We examine syntactic positions of bare arguments in Turkish on the basis of aspectual (Aktionsart) properties of VPs (e.g. Vendler 1967) and prosodic structure. Looking at where low adverbs appear, we propose that there are (at least) two different positions where bare internal arguments can occur in syntax – bare internal arguments of Turkish achievements occur in SpecVP while those of accomplishments occur in the complement position of V. This proposal is also supported by prosodic evidence.