Hypothetical Comparison in Turkish
Utku Türk, Ömer Demirok
September 2021 

In this paper, we present a preliminary investigation of the complex formative -mışcasına in Turkish, used for hypothetical comparison. We observe that -mışcasına differs from its counterparts in previously studied hypothetical comparison constructions in one key aspect: It can naturally target non-eventive nominal predicates. Furthermore, we find that -mışcasına is primarily licensed in linguistic contexts that make a gradable property available. Building on these initial empirical observations, we flesh out a novel account of hypothetical comparison that makes use of a well-established formalism of degree semantics and semantics of equatives, eschewing the intricate notion of event similarity which is central to previous accounts. In particular, we argue that -mışcasına compares an actual degree against hypothetical degrees, asserting that the actual degree is greater than or equal to any of the hypothetical degrees.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/005956 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (TU+6)
keywords:	hypothetical comparison, equatives, degree semantics, turkish, semantics
previous versions:	v1 [May 2021]
Downloaded:	382 times

 

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