NOUN SEMANTICS AND NUMBER MARKING IN TURKISH

This work investigates the semantics of nouns and the marking of nominal number in Turkish. Nouns in Turkish behave in a way that is significantly different from their counterparts in languages like English. They appear in their bare form without number specification and are not pluralized when they co-occur with numerals. The questions raised are why nouns behave the way they do and whether their characteristics can be uniformly captured. In previous work, these questions were not addressed since the focus was mostly on the similarities and differences between nouns and adjectives and whether nouns form a lexical category. I show that nouns not only form a lexical category, but their semantic and morpho-syntactic properties indicate that they pattern with set nouns as a nominal subcategory within the typology of nominal subcategories (Rijkhoff, 2002ab, 2008). The analysis also accounts for number discord as well as lack thereof between plural subjects and verbs.