On morphological requirements for auxiliary verb periphrasis in Turkish

Abstract

This paper investigates auxiliary verb periphrasis in Turkish with a particular focus on its morphological requirements. The distribution of auxiliary verbs in Turkish shows the overflow pattern (à la Bjorkman 2011), where auxiliary verbs are present only in complex inflection forms. I argue that their pattern follows from a well-formedness constraint, which requires tense, aspect and modality suffixes be linearly adjacent to a verbalized M-Word under the definition in Embick (2007). The proposed analysis follows the previous literature in that it takes auxiliary verbs to be inserted at PF (Bjorkman 2011; Fenger 2020), but in addition assumes that the PF-insertion is driven by morphological requirements. The analysis is particularly supported by the behavior of the abilitative modality in Turkish. The present study thus suggests that languages may use different strategies for auxiliary verb periphrasis despite their surface similarity, and sheds light on the morphosyntactic nature of verb complexes formed under agglutination.