Not every gap is a gap: Turkish Right Node Raising and the Syntax-PF interface

Date

2025-7

Author

Şehit, Özhan Alp

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

429
views

0
downloads

Cite This

This thesis investigates Right Node Raising (RNR) constructions in Turkish. I argue that Turkish RNR requires both ellipsis and multidominance. The evidence comes from the variation in agreement morphology on the surviving verb: I show that when the verb shows cumulative agreement (i.e., when it agrees with both subjects), the structure shows effects reminiscent of multidominance (licenses plurality dependent expressions and allows distributive readings). In comparison, when the verb shows non-cumulative agreement (i.e., when it agrees with the subject of the final conjunct), the structure exhibits effects reminiscent of ellipsis (allows morphological and polarity mismatches, yields sloppy readings of pronouns, and permits the verbs in the two conjuncts to be semantically different). I also show that these effects are in complementary distribution, suggesting that an observed effect is only compatible with either multidominance or ellipsis. In addition, I argue that multidominance and ellipsis can interact, but I show that this interaction is sensitive to constituency.

Subject Keywords

Right Node Raising, ellipsis, multidominance, Turkish, gapping

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/115419

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis