Manuscripts

Abstract

Mirror Principle (henceforth, MP) was proposed by Baker (1985), as a hypothesis that attempts to

argue for parallelism between syntactic and morphological operations. The grammatical

operations argued to be relevant to this principle are agreement, case, and grammatical function

changing operations such as the construction of passives and causatives. This paper shows that the

ordering and scope relations of the modal affixes {-A}, {-bil} and {-mAlI} in Turkish give unclear

and contradictory results when evaluated under the Mirror Principle, indicating that the Mirror

Principle cannot extend its explanatory power to modal affixes or that the syntactic operations and

morphological operations are not in a strict mirror-image configuration.

Abstract

This paper is concerned with unstable roots in Turkish, which are mostly loan words displaying disharmony and vowel alternation among speakers. Such a phenomenon has been acknowledged by previous works such as Clements & Sezer (1982), Balım & Seegmiller (1996), Kabak and, (2011 Kabak & Weber (2013). This study aims to investigate this phenomenon by new data, as well as testing the previously presented data to see if native speakers of Turkish has a certain tendency towards the harmonic alternations to these unstable roots and if the previously stated observations on vowel alternations in unstable root still hold. The results show that the root alternations are not necessarily harmony-driven operations, while also providing implications on the directionality of internal vowel harmony.

Abstract

Adverbs have been vastly worked on where in the structure they are and what they can take scope over (Jackendoff, 1972; Pollock, 1989; Iatridou, 1990; Johnson, 1991; Bowers, 1993; Alexiadou,  1997; Potsdam, 1988; Cinque; 1999, 2004 among others). This paper aims to discuss how the canonical positions of the temporal adverb yarın (tomorrow) and the simplex manner adverb yavaş  (slowly) affects whether they can be preposed out of an embedded clause with a contrastive focus reading that can still be interpreted within the said embedded clause. The result reveals that simplex manner adverbs cannot be preposed long-distance out of their embedded cause whereas temporal adverbs can, due to where they get merged initially in the derivation.