The verbal functional domain in the Denizli dialect of Turkish

Abstract

this thesis, I study the verbal domain in the Denizli Dialect of Turkish including syntactic and morphological characteristics of the functional categories (Tense, Aspect, Modality), the copulas i- and ol-, and person agreement markers. I first aim at presenting a novel look at the morpho-syntax of the Turkish verbal domain, in light of two realizational theories, Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz, 1993, among others) and Nano-syntax (Starke, 2009, among others ), which to my knowledge has not been done for Turkish before. Standard Turkish and Denizli Dialect behave the same in this respect. I try to give an account on the distribution of copula and the reason why it is realized in the structure. I argue that the copula is merged in order to satisfy the requirements of the functional categories to have a visible VP in their domains (cf. Enç, 2004, Kelepir, 2003). As for the nature of the insertion of phonological pieces to the structure produced by the syntax, because of the exceptional behavior of -mIş in terms of the Subset Principle of Distributive Morphology, I adopt Nano-syntactic theory and its most basic principle, The Superset Principle and present an analysis based on its tenets. Lastly, I outline an analysis on the person agreement mechanism of the Denizli Dialect. The verbal and nominal person agreement (spelled-out by two different paradigms) show differences in the Denizli Dialect and in capturing the different behaviors of them, I claim that the two agreement types (verbal and nominal) have different syntactic positions, establishing different kinds of relations. The verbal agreement relation is established inside the predicate structure, whereas the nominal agreement relation is established outside the predicate, in the C level (following Miyagawa, 2010). In addition to the different behaviors of the two agreement types, the spell-out mechanism of the person agreement is also analyzed within the Nano-syntactic framework.