The Syntax of Subject Suppression in Turkish

Abstract

This thesis has two aims: The first is to establish that OSV word order sentences in Turkish, along with the related Oblique-NP SV word order sentences, can have two different syntactic structures, one resulting from A-movement, and the other from A’-movement; I refer to the structures resulting from A-movement as ‘subject suppression’ constructions. The second aim of the thesis is to analyze the syntactic structure of subject suppression constructions. I rely on novel tests based on the semantics of specificity in Turkish to delineate the subject suppression constructions. I then propose that these constructions have their external arguments merged in the specifier of VP, and semantically interpreted via a special composition rule, as suggested by Kratzer (1996, p. 113) before being dismissed in favour of her VoiceP proposal.