On copular clitic forms in Turkish

Abstract

This paper argues for a novel classification of the morphology in a canonical agglutinative language, namely Turkish, in some respects. I argue here that what has traditionally been described as true agglutination is actually due to cliticization. While true agglutination exists as well, it is distinct from cliticization. I look here at verbs exclusively and discuss cliticized forms of the inflected copula as well as some other clitics that attach to verbs at cliticization sites. If the analysis proposed here is correct, Turkish has only two genuinely verbal simple finite forms: the definite past and the conditional. All other tense-aspect-mood inflections are actually inflections of the copula and not of the main verb.