Movement of Bare Objects in Turkish

Direct objects in Turkish may surface with or without overt case-marking. We refer to the object that lacks a case suffix as a bare object (BO). BOs differ from their case-marked counterparts in obligatorily receiving non-specific interpretation, and in being more restricted in the range of positions that they can occupy. We propose an analysis that explains both the distributional possibilities of BOs, as well as their non-specific reading. On our analysis, a BO undergoes movement for discourse-related reasons, but lacking a case-marker, it cannot move on its own; rather the BO pied-pipes the entire VP with it. By the time this movement happens, the VP contains only the BO, after the verb has vacated it on the way to T 0 . The non-specific interpretation of BOs follows from the fact that they always occupy a VP-internal position, rather than from the fact that they lack case-marking.

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