A Paradigm Gap in Turkish

Abstract

In this paper, we argue that Turkish has a gap in the third person plural cell of the person-number agreement paradigm of desiderative constructions formed with the -AsI suffix. We provide evidence for this claim from a corpus search and an acceptability judgment experiment. The corpus search shows that the third person plural suffix is virtually unattested with -AsI desideratives and the results of the experiment show that the third person plural suffix significantly reduces the acceptability of -AsI desideratives. In order to account for the observation that third person plural desideratives are unacceptable for most speakers, we argue that both negative evidence and competition accounts contribute to the existence and persistence of the gap. We discuss that competition accounts are supported by the presence of two competing forms whereas negative evidence accounts are supported by the anomalous relative frequency distribution in the paradigm of desideratives.