Roots, Heads, or Both? Categorizing Turkish Derivational Affixes

Abstract

The categorization of derivational affixes has received well-deserved attention in Distributed Morphology. In addition to single-categorization views that classify derivational affixes as either roots or heads, a recent proposal argues that such units can be both roots and heads. While this categorization has been shown to explain Dutch and English data, whether it applies to different languages has not been extensively investigated. In order to investigate the applicability of this recent proposal to the Turkish language, this study examined Turkish derivational suffixes in terms of their stress, flexibility, selection, and ordering patterns. The results showed that the proposal cannot account for the patterns of derivational suffixes in Turkish.