Minimal words in Turkish: A view from locality

Abstract

This thesis proposes that the apparent irregularity of minimal words in Turkish emerges from the interaction between phonology and morphosyntax. In order to analyze this interaction, I utilize Government Phonology and Distributed Morphology. Firstly, I argue that only nouns in Turkish should be at least bimoraic in size, other categories such as verbs ‘ye, de, ko’ (eat, say, put), conjunction ‘ve’ (and), demonstratives ‘bu, şu, o’ (this, that (near), that (far)), clitic ‘mI’ are saved from this constraint. I also argue that the only apparently exceptional noun ‘su’ is not an exception, but ends with a glottal stop as in the following ‘sʊɁ’. My claim on ‘su’ is based on two facts: i) historically ‘su’ was ‘sub’ or ‘suv’ and according to McCarthy (2018) if a consonant is deleted in the historical process, a glottal stop is inserted in its place, ii) the phonetic features of ‘su’ show that the vowel ‘u’ is not lax although word final high vowels in Turkish are as such. Secondly, as I make use of Distributed Morphology, I predict that the bimoraic minimal size condition is a local constraint and there should be exceptional nouns when a category assigning head other than n0 intervenes between the root and the n0 because of the local nature of spell-out. In fact, I show that this prediction is confirmed through ‘ne-yi’ (what ACC) and phrasal compounds such as ‘ye emr-i’ (eat.IMP order-CM).