Inflected doubled verbs in Turkish

Abstract

This study investigates aspectual, morpho-syntactic and prosodic properties of Infected Doubled Verbs (DVs) in Turkish with the aim of providing a systematic analysis of the data based on a grammaticality judgment experiment and our own examples. DVs include two adjacent copies of a finite verb stem, where ‘finite’ means a verb stem with a verb root, a tense-aspect marker and a subject agreement marker. DVs express event iteration or duration based on lexical aspect of DVs, temporal adverbs and the main verb. We argue that DVs are adverbs termed as Continuous Adverbs (ContAdv) with three features specified in their lexical entry: a +copy feature on the head of ContAdv, a Tense Phrase (TP) complement and a specification stating that the +copy feature copy a Phonological Phrase (PPh). The copied PPh corresponds to an Aspectual Phrase (AspectP) within the TP complement, shown by the non-doublability of temporal adverbs with the verb stem. Evidence for a complement TP of ContAdv comes from the discussion of whether: (i) phrase levels below TP can be doubled with the verb stem, (ii) material below TP can modify or be the argument of DVs, (iii) levels above TP exist in DVs. Evidence for PPh copying comes from the observation that items other than the verb stem can only be doubled with the verb stem if they are in the same PPh. This study points to two generalizations: (i) Turkish adverbs form two major groups lexically–those with +copy and without +copy-, (ii) phrase-level copying targets PPhs.