Reduction without fusion: Grammaticalization and wordhood in Turkish

Abstract

Abstract Despite ample evidence that grammaticalization is accompanied by phonological reduction and ultimately morphological fusion, the latter process is remarkably less common in Turkish – hence its prototypically agglutinating morphology. Since vowel harmony is a means of articulatory reduction, Turkish, as a vowel-harmonic language, therefore shows reduction but (virtually) no fusion. One morphosyntactic consequence of agglutination is that Turkish “suffixes” in many ways continue to behave like free words. To compensate for the resulting lack of clear-cut suffixes, vowel harmony and stress are co-opted to perform affixal functions such as the demarcation of words and encoding of relationships among morphemes. Due to the grammatical function of suffix vowels, however, even grammaticalized items must then remain at least monosyllabic, which constrains the extent of fusion possible. This situation suggests that theories of grammaticalization that do not sufficiently distinguish between reduction and fusion need to be refined. In addition, it highlights the need for language-specific analyses on the diachronic dimension and restores the status of morphological typology as a predictor of certain linguistic variables.