Syntactic Positions of Turkish Bare NPs The View from Aspect and Prosody

The goal of this paper is to show that internal arguments of verbs in Turkish do not uniformly occur in the complement position of the verb (contra e.g. Perlmutter 1978, 1989). We examine syntactic positions of bare arguments in Turkish on the basis of aspectual (Aktionsart) properties of VPs (e.g. Vendler 1967) and prosodic structure. Looking at where low adverbs appear, we propose that there are (at least) two different positions where bare internal arguments can occur in syntax – bare internal arguments of Turkish achievements occur in SpecVP while those of accomplishments occur in the complement position of V. This paper is organized in the following way: Section 2 presents some background information on Turkish. Section 3 discusses Turkish prosody and our previous proposal regarding the syntax-prosody interface in this language. Section 4 focuses on low adverb placement in Turkish. Section 5, then, presents the current proposal about the syntactic positions of bare arguments based on aspectual properties and low adverb placement. Section 6 concludes the paper.