Resultative constructions in Turkish

Abstract

This thesis studies the syntactic structure of resultative constructions in Turkish and investigates whether the secondary predicate is within or outside the minimal VP. Based on the constraints governing the behavior of resultative constructions with respect to a number of syntactic phenomena, this thesis demonstrates that resultative constructions in Turkish built on unergative verbs are associated with tensed bi-clausal structures. In contrast, resultative constructions built on transitive and unaccusative verbs have mono-clausal structures in which the secondary predicate merges as an adverbial adjunct outside the minimal VP. It is further argued that some constructions that look superficially similar to resultative constructions are in fact associated with different syntactic structures. This thesis also investigates the assumed macro-parametric correlation between resultative constructions and directed manner of motion constructions, and argues that the assumed correlation cannot account for the right degree of variation in the cross-linguistic distribution of directed manner of motion constructions. A nanosyntactic account of Turkish directed manner of motion constructions is proposed according to which Turkish does not allow (some) directed manner of motion constructions due to the lack of required lexical items.