The interaction between past and conditional morphemes in Turkish

Abstract

This paper focuses on the two conditional antecedent morphemes in Turkish, -(y)sA and -sA, and how the past morpheme interacts with them to generate different interpretations. Inspired by von Fintel and Iatridou (2023), I refer to -(y)sA as the O-marking, which is restricted to the epistemically possible worlds, and -sA as the X-marking, which refers to a wider domain than this context set. I argue that the past in O-marking denotes the actual past time. However, when the past morpheme appears with X-marking, it further widens the domain to include even less possible or impossible worlds. In line with Kaufmann (2022), I also argue for different levels of remoteness in X-marked conditionals and suggest that the past widens the domain further than the first level of X-marking by shifting back in time as she suggests.