Labeling, Concord, and Nominal Syntax in Turkish

According to Chomsky’s Labeling Algorithm the merger of two phrases, i.e., {XP, YP}, is labeled either via feature sharing between the two elements or by ignoring the lower copies of movement chains. It is not immediately clear, within this approach, how adjunction structures such as {aP,...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bayırlı, İsa Kerem
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy
Format: Article
Published: Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute 2022
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/146621
Description
Summary:According to Chomsky&rsquo;s Labeling Algorithm the merger of two phrases, i.e., {XP, YP}, is labeled either via feature sharing between the two elements or by ignoring the lower copies of movement chains. It is not immediately clear, within this approach, how adjunction structures such as {aP, nP} are to be labeled. In those languages where adjectives show concord with nouns in <i>&phi;</i> features, the shared features may provide the label.This option is not available for non-concord languages, however. In this paper, we focus on the labeling of {aP, nP} in Turkish, a non-concord language. We claim that the categorizing n<sup>0</sup> head in Turkish lacks grammatical features, as a result of which aP fails to find valued instances of its unvalued features. In the absence of feature sharing, aP is marked as a Spell-Out domain, and {aP, nP} is labeled as nP as soon as aP is sent to the interfaces. Since aP in Turkish is a Spell-Out domain, the left-branch extraction of adjectives (i.e., aP movement) is not possible. Moreover, the lack of any grammatical features on n<sup>0</sup> in Turkish accounts for the availability of suspension of the plural morpheme.