Non-canonical morphological patterns in Turkish: Evidence from person-number markers

Abstract

This study investigates the structure and behavior of the person-number markers in the Turkish verbal inflectional paradigms. It mainly argues against the predominant view that Turkish morphology is highly regular and transparent by providing evidence from the content-form mismatches displayed by the person-number markers on verbal word-forms. There are two novel attempts of this study. First, by extending the notion of inflectional classes, it proposes that Turkish verbal inflectional paradigms function like inflectional classes where the same content is realized by different sets of markers in each paradigm. Second, it models the Turkish verbal inflectional paradigms and analyzes multiple content-form mismatches due to some irregular behavior of the person-number markers within a word-based paradigm function theory - the paradigm-linkage theory (Stump, 2016). The conclusions of this research are as follows: i) When the examples of non-canonical aspects within the nominal paradigms are also taken into consideration, it is observed that all Turkish inflectional paradigms host non-canonical morphological patterns. ii) Turkish has verbal inflectional classes where the stems of different lexemes are replaced by the complex stems: stem+TAM (tense-aspect-mood) marker. iii) Based on the content-form mismatches and the irregularities following a regular pattern within the same paradigm or across paradigms, the data of the study support the view that inflectional paradigms are primitives rather than just descriptive devices.