On the Status of TP in Turkish

In this paper I provide evidence that the element traditionally analyzed as T0 in Turkish is, in fact, a realization of a Mood-head, which is the locus of epistemic modality/conditional. This treatment captures a set of facts surrounding the phenomenon of Suspended Affixation (SA) as well as possible combinations of affix stacking in Turkish, while maintaining the Tense-Mood-Aspect hierarchy. In addition, the analysis advanced in this paper derives the behavior of Q-particles, verbal interactions with the “sentential” negation head, restrictions on embedding, and the optionality of agreement Spellout. Theoretically, the paper contributes to the debate on the inventory of functional projections in languages: it contends that TP is not universally present and considers some broader typological implications of this claim.

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