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Hybridity and change in Turkish inflectional morphology

 | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Published online: 20 November 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.24071.neu
Abstract
The agreement morpheme in the Turkish verbal domain surfaces in different paradigms depending on the preceding TAM marker. (1996). On copular clitic forms in Turkish. In A. Alexiadou, N. Fuhrhop, P. Law, & S. Löhken (Eds.), ZAS papers in Linguistics (pp. 96–114, Vol. 61). Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar has proposed that this difference in spell-out signals a deeper syntactic difference, in that z-paradigm but not k-paradigm agreement morphemes are preceded by a silent copula. The present study is concerned with yet another, more recently documented paradigm attested in colloquial speech. Its key empirical finding is that these new forms are hybrids that share properties with both the k- and the z-paradigm. Its main theoretical claim is that this finding also affects our understanding of the older two sets of forms. Accordingly, the paper develops a novel allomorphy analysis of the three agreement paradigms. The allomorphy grammar proposed here and Kornfilt’s copula grammar can coexist within a single speaker, and the former might have developed diachronically out of the latter.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The distribution of the three agreement paradigms
  • 3.Allomorphy and hybridity
  • 4.Simple, participial and hybrid tenses
    • 4.1Diagnostics
      • 4.1.1The negation marker değil
      • 4.1.2The epistemological copula -DIr
      • 4.1.3Participial modifiers
      • 4.1.4Suspended affixation
      • 4.1.5The polar question marker mI
      • 4.1.6Stress
      • 4.1.7Summary
    • 4.2Analysis
      • 4.2.1TAM-sensitive diagnostics
      • 4.2.2Agr-sensitive diagnostics
  • 5.From a copula grammar to an allomorphy grammar
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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