The Turkish partitive as simple nominal phrases: evidence from incorporation and specificity

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  • March 21, 2019
Creator
  • Gil, Eduardo Hugo
    • Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Linguistics
Abstract
  • Partitive constructions express part-whole relations as in the English phrase two slices of cake. There has been continuing debate about how to treat such phrases syntactically and semantically. That is, which of the partitive construction's constituents is dominant: the 'part' expression two slices or the 'whole' expression cake? We propose that the syntactic structures of partitive and non-partitive noun phrases in Turkish are identical, and that consequently, the dominant constituent for both is the head of the structurally higher NP. For partitives, this higher head of NP corresponds to the 'part' expression. In Turkish, the NP of both partitives and simple, nonpartitive clauses is the complement of a functional Case head: K. For all partitives, the part expression serves as the head of this complement NP. Internal to this NP, an NP corresponding to the 'whole' expression is generated and moved to the specifier position of the Case Phrase, or KP, for case licensing. Evidence is drawn from our fieldwork on specificity, word order, and the distribution of case in Turkish. Alternative semantic and morphosyntactic theories of incorporation and partitivity are considered but found inconsistent with our data. KEY WORDS: partitivity, Case, incorporation, specificity, scrambling, Turkish
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  • In Copyright
Advisor
  • Hendrick, Randall
Degree granting institution
  • University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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  • Open access
Date uploaded
  • October 11, 2010

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