S-Lab: Utku Turk (LING)

Controlling morphosyntactic competition through phonology

Abstract: I will be discussing a case of suspended affixation (SA) in Turkish and its unexpected interaction with suppletive morphology. SA is a phenomenon in which a certain affix(es) is affixed to the periphery of the coordination but interpreted for all coordinates, and it is analyzed with a deletion analysis where the affix(es) on the first conjunct is deleted after coordination. While it usually has an easy-going relation with phonology (deletion before phonology), the case with suppletion is a funny one. Erschler (2018) showed that non-word remnants are banned in Ossetic SA environments; yet, Guseva and Weisser (2018) demonstrated the exact opposite with Mari, creating a problematic picture for a uniform analysis of SA. Turkish provides a different picture. While non-words remnants are not allowed in Turkish, the distribution of SA with respect to non-harmonizing conjuncts and other pronominals tells us that the process of SA should involve both phonological and structural constraints at the same time.