Broken Forms in Morphology

A curious paradox is provided by incomplete or “broken” morphological structures in surface syntactic strings: bound forms, thus forms illegitimate at word-level, have full status as syntactic atoms and participate in syntax as if they were complete. This paper explores how morphological brachylogy or ellipsis ought best to be understood and what the phenomenon reveals about the relations between morphology and other components of grammar. It will be shown that morphological brachylogy can be applied to a wide range of structural types: inflection and word-formation, including the processes of compounding, prefixation, and suffixation, whereby modificational processes such as vowel alternations may also participate. In (1a), a Turkish sentence fragment consists of three conjoined verbs. Each inflected verb form consists of a root, a suffix indicating aorist , a null copula clitic, and a suffix indicating subject agreement (Kabak, to appear). In the optional variant (1b), however, the first two verbs in the series are provided only with the aorist suffix, while the subject agreement marking occurs once, on the verb in the final conjunct. This is a model case of morphological brachylogy in inflection. We can consider that the agreement suffix in the final conjunct “has scope” over the verbs in the preceding conjuncts, that is, that the values ‘1 person’, ‘plural’ hold for these verbs; the non-occurrence of the first agreement affixes is legitimized through the presence of the final one. Note here also that phonological, although not phonetic, identity obtains.