The syntax of focus particles in Turkish

Abstract

This study aims to answer three main questions on the syntax of focus particles based on the data in Turkish: (i) Where is the exact location in the phrase structure of Turkish that focus particles are generated? (ii) Are there any subsequent movement operations from Surface Structure to Logical Form that would allow the particle take propositional scope, and if yes what are they? (iii) Is it possible for the particles to modify any non-verbal projections? The analysis covers the scalar additive particles hatta ‘even’ and bile ‘even’, the additive particle dA ‘also’, and the exclusive particle sadece ‘only’. The analysis on the positions and the syntactic domains of the focus particles shows that there are three specific focus projections in the phrase structure of Turkish, and these are phrase-level (vP-internal), clause-level (vP-external) and utterance-level (CP). Negation is assumed to prohibit raising of the focused phrases to clause-level and utterance-level focus projections. Such prohibitions prevent interpretation since all the focused phrases are assumed to be raised to these projections for interpretation. Three specific proposals based on this phrase structure are presented. The first proposal includes the focus particles in the study in affirmative clauses, the second proposal covers the focus particles in negative clauses, and the last proposal presents a syntactic behavior matrix, which includes the scalar additive particles hatta ‘even’ and bile ‘even’ in Turkish, along with even, the scalar additive focus particle in English, and sogar, the scalar additive focus particle in German.