Verb Doubling in Turkish: Data from Trabzon Dialect

Hande Sevgi

doi:10.3765/ptu.v6i1.5063

Abstract

This study investigates verb doubling structures in Trabzon dialect of Turkish. Based on the similarities and the differences between this structure and the similar phenomena in other languages, I aim to identify the structural properties of VDbl in order to provide a representation of this structure within the Minimalist framework (Chomsky 1993). Following Harizanov and Gribanova’s analysis on Russian predicate clefts, I claim that this structure can be analyzed via the presence of two different movement processes: A focus related movement in narrow syntax, and a post-syntactic head movement.

Highlights

A specific structure which bears similar properties with verb doubling phenomena in other languages is used in some dialects of Turkish spoken in Trabzon, a city on the Black Sea coast of northeastern Turkey: language (1) Context: A: How did you go there, did you drive? B: I went there by walking.Yürü-me yürü-dü-m. walk-MA walk-PST-1SG ‘I walked.’This structure (VDbl) is interpreted with emphasis on the meaning of the action defined by the verb (Coşar, 2015)
In order to account for the adjacent nature of the constituents and and the absence of negation and TAM markers on the double, I claim that Trabzon dialect has an internal focus position above vP and dominated by NegP/TP, following the identificational focus of Kiss (1998) as well as Şener’s (2010) analysis of contrastive focus in Turkish
I provide a description of the properties of verb doubling structures in Trabzon Turkish

Summary

Introduction

A specific structure which bears similar properties with verb doubling phenomena in other languages is used in some dialects of Turkish spoken in Trabzon, a city on the Black Sea coast of northeastern Turkey: language (1) Context: A: How did you go there, did you drive? B: I went there by walking. We do not observe a similar constraint in VDbl; on the contrary, VDbl targets the main verb of the sentences which is inflected with TAM markers These previous works and examples from different languages show that VDbl in Trabzon dialect shares some properties with these structures. In order to account for the adjacent nature of the constituents and and the absence of negation and TAM markers on the double, I claim that Trabzon dialect has an internal focus position above vP and dominated by NegP/TP, following the identificational focus of Kiss (1998) as well as Şener’s (2010) analysis of contrastive focus in Turkish. I argue that the structure is as shown in (31)

NegP T ty ModPABIL Neg ty CFP ModABIL ty

Conclusions and remarks