A historical medical text in orthopedics Risâle-i Tıbb

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to investigate existential constructions in Turkish. The focus will be on the semantic, discourse as well as structural properties of Noun Phrases (NPs henceforth) in these structures. It is well-attested that there are different types of NPs such as bare NPs, singular and plural indefinite NPs that can serve as pivots in existential constructions in the language. However, some of them exhibit certain characteristics that are rather different from those of their counterparts in other languages. Bare NPs, for instance, are obligatorily interpreted as number-neutral and do not introduce discourse referents. This is rather unexpected given the main function of existential constructions cross-linguistically. To account for this behavior of these nominals, I argue that a pseudo-incorporation analysis that was proposed in order to explain the characteristics of direct objects in such structures as verbal sentences, idioms and light verb sentences could be extended to bare NPs in existential constructions. Unlike the analysis in previous work, however, I argue that pseudo-incorporation applies to bare NPs only, excluding singular and plural indefinite NPs. In addition, the account proposed here displays certain differences from those analyses that treat existential bare NPs as non-phrasal. A close analysis shows that existential bare NPs in Turkish are in fact phrasal elements.