Haplology and local dislocation in Turkish: Evidence from associative plural constructions

Abstract

In Turkish, a possessed kinship term (e.g. anne-m ”mother-pos.1sg”) can serve as a base to the associative plural suffix. However, forms where (i) an associative plural suffix follows a plural agreement suffix or (ii) the associative plural suffix -lAr follows the possessive marker -(s)I are ungrammatical. This study investigates the source of these gaps and argues that, in the first group, the ungrammaticality of the forms arises from the structural adjacency of two [+plural] features; and, in the second group, the ungrammaticality of forms is due to a ban on the suffix order *-(s)I+lAr, which is repaired as -lAr+(s)I. It is argued that while the first grammatical constraint applies at the level of abstract features, i.e., morphosyntax, the second constraint applies at the form level, i.e., morphophonology.