Schedule StuTS 68

This study aims to investigate the organization of the lexicon with the assumption that words are category-free in the lexicon by giving examples from Pomak language, which is an understudied, endangered South Slavic language spoken in Thrace (Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria).

This study aims to investigate the organization of the lexicon with the assumption that words are category-free in the lexicon by giving examples from Pomak language, which is an understudied, endangered South Slavic language spoken in Thrace (Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria). In this paper, I used the data that Sandry (2013) provides and I collected data from three speakers of Pomak1. The central investigation of this paper is the borrowed words from Turkish, which is a gender-neutral language, such as zengin- in ‘rich male’ and ‘zengin-ka’ ‘rich female’. Sandry (2013) claims that –in is part of the root and when suffix -ka is attached to the word, -in is deleted. However, in this paper, I claim that –in cannot be part of the root but it is a suffix that marks gender. The reason why the suffixes –ka and –in cannot co-occur is that both of them mark word category but the former marks masculine gender while the latter marks feminine gender and since a stem cannot have two different grammatical gender, there is no stem such as *zengin-in-ka. I also give further evidence by analyzing adjective derivation in Pomak in order to show that the adjectival functional head –sk is also added the roots such as zengin to make the root adjective. This piece of data shows the fact that zengin must be a category-free unit in the lexicon and grammatical gender is a feature to make the noun function syntactically rather than being present in the root inherently, following the claim of Thornton’s (2009). Finally, I also analyze the dative suffix – u-mu and –i-xi to show that –sk is an adjective marker and –i marks masculine gender, thereby concluding that –ski can be decomposed as –sk and –i unlike the claim of Sandry (2013). In conclusion, my claim is that roots are stored without having category-related information and gender information. They acquire these two pieces of information upon merging with a functional head, which supports the assumption of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz, 1993; Halle, 1990; Noyer, 1997). What is more, the suffixes –ka and –in are fused morphemes, the former consisting of features [+noun, + fem.], while the latter consisting of [+noun, +masc.]. However, -sk-i is not a fused morpheme and it has two parts as –sk [+adj] and –i [+masc.], the former specifies the word category while the latter marks the gender.

Keywords: Morphosyntax; Distributed Morphology; Categoriless roots; Functional heads; Grammatical gender

Info

Day: 2020-11-19
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 00:30
Room: Agathe Lasch
Track: Theoretical Linguistics
Language: en

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