Constraints on Free Relative Clauses in Turkish

Abstract

This paper investigates aspects of Turkish relative constructions that have attracted little, or no, attention previously: 1. the order of morphemes--in particular, of agreement morphemes of the participle and of the plural morpheme of the (understood) head--in the verbal complex of Free Relative Clauses (FRCs) with regular factive participial morphology; 2. the lack of so-called "matching effects" in Turkish HRCs;  3. lack of genuine infinitival relative clauses (both headed and non-headed) and the existence of (headed) "future tense" or "irrealis" relative constructions instead; 4. lack of FRCs in the irrealis.

I shall suggest that the the explanation for the observations in 1, 2 and 4 has to do with a constraint on empty operators originally proposed in Levin (1983): Empty operators cannot be governed. If on the right track, this study provides an additional piece of evidence in favor of head government--a notion abandoned in recent work (e.g. Chomsky 1993) but very recently defended again (cf. Rizzi 1995). This paper also attempts to provide evidence for the existence of syntactic rules that are motivated by the necessity to overtly mark the scope for certain rules taking place at LF.