Accusative Licensing of Nouns in Turkish

Abstract

The observation that some Turkish nouns license accusative marking of their complements has puzzled linguistics for the last three decades. The first and the most common hypothesis is that such nouns are part of light-verb compounds in their infinitive nominal form where the verbal part is dropped. In this paper, I argue that light-verb hypothesis is incorrect by providing several constructions where it fails to account for. I propose an alternative, two-part hypothesis. The first part is independent of the light-verb constructions and claims that in Turkish, the accusative case is licensed by verb stems rather than finite verbs. This is a natural corollary of a yet larger hypothesis about the structure of syntax trees for languages like Turkish which claims that the syntax trees go deeper than the word level. The leaves of such trees are morphemes or morpheme groups and the whole of infection/derivation is considered within a single morphosyntactic structure. The implication is that as far as the case-licensing is concerned, only the verb stems license accusative case. In constructions where a deverbal noun seems to be licensing accusative case, it is actually the verb stem in the noun’s derivation tree that licenses the accusative case. The second part of the hypothesis is the claim that the case-licensing nouns are actually lexicalizations involving multiple adjacent leaves in the morphosyntactic tree. The most common manifestations of this are the lexicalizations of verb stem-participle pairs through replacement with templatic surface forms borrowed from Arabic. The new proposal naturally explains the observation that accusative licensing is most common for a small set of words borrowed from Arabic. I illustrate that these words are the templatic forms of their multi-morpheme counterparts in Turkish which correspond to deverbal nouns, adjectives or adverbs.