Abstract
This article presents well-formedness conditions on Turkish coordinate constructions with suspended affixation (SA), where certain bound morphemes are omitted from all conjuncts other than the final one while maintaining their semantic scope over the whole construction. It is argued that the legitimacy of verbal conjuncts with suspended affixation neither directly falls out from the conjunct's being the complement of the copula, nor is it due to the type of agreement paradigm. Instead, the article provides a unified analysis that accounts for SA in both verbal and nonverbal constructions based on the notion of morphological words. The morphological word is comprised of a stem plus optional affixes, the right edge of which can terminate a morphological string independently from agreement markers. Accordingly, SA is licit if the omission of inflectional affixes in nonfinal conjuncts results in a morphological word. It is further shown that the terminal morphemes must be overtly marked in nonfinal conjuncts although they can be null elsewhere, and derivational morphemes cannot be suspended. Finally, it is argued that affixes that exhibit tight phonological cohesion with their stems resist suspension, suggesting that the degree of morphological bonding correlates with the degree of phonological cohesion.
© Walter de Gruyter
