Turkish causatives are recursive: A response to Key 2013
Yining Nie
May 2022 

It is claimed in Key 2013 that Turkish, despite allowing multiple causative morphemes on a single complex verb, does not in fact allow causative recursion, where one causing event is embedded by another causing event. This paper argues against Key’s conclusion, using evidence from eventhood diagnostics to show that "double" causatives in Turkish encode two distinct, syntactically represented causing events in addition to the caused event. Thus Turkish causatives are indeed recursive. This finding supports approaches to productive affixal causatives which allow recursive embedding of the same category over approaches which rely on a fixed functional hierarchy.

Format:	[ pdf ]
Reference:	lingbuzz/006636 (please use that when you cite this article)
Published in:	to appear in Linguistic Inquiry Squibs
keywords:	causative, morphology, syntax, argument structure, recursion, turkish, morphology, syntax
Downloaded:	674 times

 

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