Browsing by Author "Turgay, Tacettin."

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    Classifier constructions of Turkish
    (Thesis (Ph.D.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2020., 2020.) Turgay, Tacettin.; Öztürk Başaran, Balkız.
    This dissertation addresses three interrelated issues concerning classifier constructions in Turkish: (i) semantics of bare noun phrases, (ii) the function of classifiers and syntactic constituency of classifier constructions, and (iii) syntax and semantics of number marking. Regarding the first issue, it is argued that Turkish bare noun phrases denote properties of entities but are inherently ambiguous with respect to whether they take kind or object entities as their domains. With respect to the second issue, it is argued that classifiers serve to restrict the ambiguous domain to object individuals only. Syntactically, a measure phrase is proposed which hosts classifiers and measure words in its head position and numerals in its specifier position. The resulting constituent, a property-denoting μP, is then applied to nouns predicatively or attributively through adjunction. It is demonstrated in particular that μP only combines with number-neutral bare nouns. As for the third issue, it is demonstrated that number specification in Turkish is relevant for DPs only, and is expressed in the φP that projects above the DP. Sub-DPs are shown to lack number specification. Number markers on bare nouns are uninterpretable agreement reflexes which must be checked against interpretable counterparts in the φP or in some other functional head. As they lack number specification, sub-DPs always receive a number-neutral reading, and thus are restricted to contexts which can handle such interpretations. DPs, on the other hand, can never receive number-neutral readings.
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    Resultative constructions in Turkish
    (Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2013., 2013.) Turgay, Tacettin.; Özsoy, A. Sumru.
    This thesis studies the syntactic structure of resultative constructions in Turkish and investigates whether the secondary predicate is within or outside the minimal VP. Based on the constraints governing the behavior of resultative constructions with respect to a number of syntactic phenomena, this thesis demonstrates that resultative constructions in Turkish built on unergative verbs are associated with tensed bi-clausal structures. In contrast, resultative constructions built on transitive and unaccusative verbs have mono-clausal structures in which the secondary predicate merges as an adverbial adjunct outside the minimal VP. It is further argued that some constructions that look superficially similar to resultative constructions are in fact associated with different syntactic structures. This thesis also investigates the assumed macro-parametric correlation between resultative constructions and directed manner of motion constructions, and argues that the assumed correlation cannot account for the right degree of variation in the cross-linguistic distribution of directed manner of motion constructions. A nanosyntactic account of Turkish directed manner of motion constructions is proposed according to which Turkish does not allow (some) directed manner of motion constructions due to the lack of required lexical items.