Morphosyntax and Phonology of Agreement in Turkish

Abstract

This paper offers a new morphosyntactic account of subject agreement in the Turkish verbal domain. The account is based on well-known, novel, and some excluded observations about the distribution and prosody of verbal agreement. In Turkish, when certain morphosyntactic requirements are met and when the verb is focused, the agreement morpheme can be optionally parsed inside or outside of the prosodically prominent part of the verbal domain. I claim that this optionality is a reflex of how the morphemes that constitute the verbal domain are post-syntactically concatenated. In particular, I argue that an agreement morpheme either lowers together with its host (full lowering); or is stranded when its host lowers (partial lowering). In full lowering, agreement is contained within the prominent part of the verbal domain, whereas in partial lowering, agreement falls outside of this prominence domain. I also show that prosodic variability is observed only when the non-canonical medial and double realization of agreement is possible. The Vocabulary Insertion rules that are postulated for the subject agreement paradigms of the Turkish verbal domain capture the possible cases of medial and double agreement and successfully predict in which environments medial agreement is optional and in which environments it is obligatory.