Properties of verbal idioms in Turkish

Abstract

This study investigates the notion syntactic jro=enness with respect to Turkish idioms headed by verbs within the framework of generative grammar. The data consist of randomly chosen 725 idioms gathered from the TDK 1988 Tiirk<;e S6=liik. These verbal idioms contain at least one NP constituent and are freely marked with various tense and aspect markers. Based on the number of non-head NPs in an idiom, the nature of the case marker that appears on the non-heads and their argument structures, verbal idioms in Turkish are categorized into eleven subcategories and it is examined whether this categorization is predictive of the syntactic behavior of the data. The syntactic properties considered are argument structure, passivization, relativization, wh-question formation, clefting/pseudo-clefting, pronominalization, and scrambling. A thorough analysis of the morphological, syntactic, and semantic properties of the data reveals that the presence vs. absence of phonologically overt case markers on idiomatic NPs plays a major role in the acceptability of syntactic operations. Moreover, it is observed that the grammatical relation of the idiomatic non-head to the head, i.e. the subject vs non-subject distinction is also of consequence. Syntactic frozenness in Turkish verbal idioms is thus defined in terms of the number of obligatory constituents, frozen inflectional endings and the syntactic structure which must be preserved even when the lexical items have been substituted for by other items, and it is claimed that a verbal idiom in Turkish consists of a certain "frame" with pre-specified structural features.