Speaker: James Griffiths (Rijksuniversiteit Groningen)
Title: Comment clauses and Turkish ki
Date: Thursday 10th October
Venue: Eyckhof 1/003C
Time: 13:15-15
Abstract
Both hypotactic (1b) and paratactic accounts (1c) of how comment clauses such as I reckon and their hosts in (1a) are related have been advanced in the previous literature.
(1) a) John will be late, I reckon.
b) [[John will be late]1 [I reckon t1]]
c) [John will be late]i [I reckon Øi]
In the first half of this talk, I review some evidence in favour of adopting (1c) over (1b) for English comment clauses. In particular I introduce the par-Merge approach to parataxis (De Vries 2007), which utilises a novel functional head called Par0. Par0 is the locus for Potts’ (2005) COMMA feature and for parenthetical coordinators such as those in (2).
(2) a) John has – (and) it won’t be the last time – stolen a car.
b) John likes music, (but) especially Jazz.
I also show that, while the par-Merge approach offers conceptual advantages and a locus for coordinators, prime facie its extension to comment clauses is not well-motivated from an empirical perspective.
In the second half of this talk, I examine Turkish ki-clauses like (3), which are typically understood as finite subordinate clauses (Underhill 1976, Erguvanlı 1981, Göksel & Kerslake 2005, a.o.): an unexpected structure in a head-final language that otherwise nominalises non-root clauses.
(3) Hasan san-ıyor [ki Ali Bey Mine-yi taciz et-ti].
Hasan believe-PROG ki Ali Mr. Mine-ACC harassment make-PST
‘Hasan believes that Mr. Ali harassed Mine.’
I argue that the purported matrix clause in (3) equates with an English comment clause, and that ki is not a complementizer (as is usually assumed), but a morphological spell-out of Par0. If this is true, Turkish ki-clauses provide indirect evidence from an unrelated language for the adoption of the par-Merge approach to English comment clauses.
References
Erguvanlı, E. 1981. A Case of Syntactic Change: ki constructions in Turkish. Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, Beşeri Bilimler Dergisi Cilt 8:111-140.
Göksel, A. & Kerslake, C. 2005. Turkish: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.
Kornfilt, J. 1997. Turkish. Routledge.
Potts, C. 2005. The Logic of Conventional Implicatures. OUP
Vries, M. de. 2007. Invisible Constituents? Parentheses as B-Merged Adverbial Phrases. In Parentheticals, ed. by Dehé, N. & Kavalova, Y,. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 203-234.