Contrastive Değil constructions In Turkish: a large conjunct and Pf-deletion analysis

Abstract

I aim to contribute new empirical evidence and theoretical insight pertinent to the general issue of negation in contrastive environments. An understanding of the contrastive değil constructions and the nature of değil in these constructions are crucially contingent on an understanding of those linguistic phenomena that involve the so-called constituent negation. Some researchers have previously suggested that değil attaches to just any constituent in syntax based on the surface order, implying that it has a cross-categorial syntax (Kornfilt, 1997; McKenzie, 2006). I argue against them by presenting conceptual and empirical evidence that değil does not negate constituents, it occupies a higher syntactic position and semantically it is above a proposition. I further argue that CDCs are composed of large conjuncts by presenting supporting evidence that the conjuncts are larger than TP but smaller than CP, namely ΣP. Değil occupies the Σ head, having Neg and E(llipsis) features on the one hand, and the correlate has a null Affirmative head occupying the respective Σ position on the other hand. In terms of information structure, it is the coordination of opposites (i.e., Contrast). Lastly, I claim that the surface order is obtained by in-situ PF-deletion following Hartmann (2000) by showing that movement accounts of ellipsis (Johnson, 1996; Merchant, 2003) cannot handle the empirical data.