Turkic impersonal passives

Abstract

Abstract. The current paper compares Sakha and Turkish through the lens of Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993) and outlines the structural differences and similarities between their canonical and impersonal passive constructions. Turkish argument structure has attracted lots of attention in the literature due to the unexpected patterns it exhibits in the domain of passive and impersonal constructions, such as double passives and passives of unaccusatives, which pose a problem for the Unaccsuative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978). To account for these structures, different previous approaches have argued that Turkish passive morphemes can in fact function as the overt realization of an argument in synthetic impersonal constructions (Dikmen et al. 2022, Legate et al. 2020). Building on this, I propose a new approach whereby these impersonal arguments are introduced by the general argument-introducing head i* (Wood & Marantz 2017), which allows for a more flexible account of passives and impersonals in Turkic and possibly beyond.