Derivational affixes as heads and phrases: evidence from Turkish diminutives
Morphology, cilt.36, sa.1, 2026 (ESCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 36 Sayı: 1
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.1007/s11525-025-09450-5
- Dergi Adı: Morphology
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), Scopus, IBZ Online, Linguistic Bibliography, MLA - Modern Language Association Database
- Anahtar Kelimeler: Derivational affixes, Diminutives, Categorial flexibility, Stress shifting, Distributed Morphology, Cyclic Spell-Out, Turkish
- Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
Recently the Distributed Morphology literature hosted two strands of debates regarding the status of derivational affixes. One main strand has been the root versus functional head status of derivational affixes. While Marantz (1997) and Marvin (2002) (among others) treated derivational affixes as functional heads, Lowenstamm (2014) and De Belder (2011) argued that they are acategorial roots. On the other hand, Creemers et al. (2018) argued that some affixes are roots and others are functional heads. The second strand of discussion has been the head versus modifier status of affixes in general. Wiltschko and Steriopolo (2007) showed that some affixes are heads whereas others are modifiers, and Gouskova and Bobaljik (2022) proposed that some affixes can be both. In this paper, we analyze the diminutive suffix -CIk in Turkish and argue that it can attach to its base as a head or as a phrasal modifier by being embedded in a larger phrase. Our proposal accounts for a variety of syntactic, semantic, and morphophonological properties such as variable productivity, vowel epenthesis, stress shift, and special idiomatic interpretations associated with -CIk.