LING 065. Structure of Turkish

Turkish, a member of the Altaic family of languages, has a lot of potential to inform research in morpho-syntax and semantics. It has a plethora of intriguing empirical phenomena, such as nominalized clausal complementation, diﬀerential object marking, agreement, incorporation, scope rigidity, recursive argument introduction and suppression operations, impersonal passivization, evidentiality, and scrambling, among others. This course aims to familiarize you with some of these phenomena within the framework of generative linguistics that helps us appreciate their significance from a cross-linguistic perspective. We will discuss various aspects of Turkish syntax and semantics to understand if the existing linguistic theories can account for the properties of Turkish. In cases where these theories fall short of accounting for Turkish facts, we will attempt to extend or modify them. The course will be formally oriented. By the end of the semester, you will be able to understand key syntactic and semantic properties of Turkish and create and modify formal representations of these properties.
Prerequisite: LING 040 and LING 050 or with instructor permission.
Social Sciences.
1 credit.
Eligible for ASIA.
Spring 2026. Sag.
Department website: Linguistics

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