An obstacle to the morphologization of postpositions

This article investigates the morphologization of postpositions and presents structural properties of Turkish postpositions and their frequency of occurrence. Turkish postpositional phrases provide chunks comprised of a frequently co-occurring case suffix on the complement followed by a postposition. According to the Linear Fusion Hypothesis (Bybee 2002), such chunks provide ideal conditions for phonological fusion. In contrast to this view, this paper shows that there is no fusion between the frequently co-occurring case suffixes and postpositions. Instead, postpositions following an uninflected form of complement have a greater chance of turning into case suffixes or clitics than those following a case-inflected form. Case suffixes serve as constant indicators of a word boundary before postpositions, thereby blocking the bonding between the postposition and the complement. Simple frequency and linearity, therefore, cannot be the sole conditions in the morphologization of postpositions.