Recursive embedding in productive causatives : the view from Turkish

This monograph investigates the morphosyntax and semantics of causative constructions, focusing on productive causatives in Turkish. The study advances the claim that Turkish allows genuine syntactic recursion in productive causatives and that the interpretation of these structures is determined by the size and internal composition of the embedded event structure. Adopting a decompositional approach to event structure, the analysis examines how causative heads interact with verbal roots, argument structure, and Voice. The study engages with the ongoing debate on causative recursion, arguing against accounts that deny structural recursion or reduce it to non-structural factors. It demonstrates that recursive causativization corresponds to the principled embedding of functional projections. The empirical analysis is based on large-scale corpus-linguistic data, providing systematic evidence for the theoretical claims. The results show that the interaction between causative formation and root semantics is mediated by argument overtness. The results show that manner/result complementarity is a decisive factor: mono-eventive manner verbs impose stricter restrictions on argument omission, whereas bi-eventive result verbs allow for greater flexibility in argument realization. By combining formal structural assumptions with corpus-based results, the monograph provides a unified account of causative recursion and contributes to a broader understanding of the interaction between morphosyntactic recursion and event semantics.