A Nanosyntactic account of the Turkish copula and agreement paradigms

Turkish displays a rich verbal domain which necessarily hosts a copula in certain contexts and where tense, aspect, mood/modality markers and agreement allomorphies abound. In this thesis, I have attempted to delineate a fresh analysis for these two phenomena, namely, the appearance of the copula in verbal structures, especially in the context of tense and aspect markers and their combinations, and agreement allomorphies -focusing on the most significant k-z paradigms- using a Nanosyntactic toolset. Although these phenomena were probed in light of earlier theories like DM, Nanosyntax, which is a rather new approach, had not been used to evaluate the Turkish verbal domain in its integrity before. I also touched upon a related phenomenon in Turkish named "suspended affixation". Through that and the other phenomena mentioned earlier, it is shown here that Nanosyntax is perfectly capable of accounting for the most part of the rich verbal domain of Turkish thanks to several tools and mechanisms it offers. However, it also has yet to provide a holistic and satisfying answer to some questions built around the appearance of the copula in general by moving from word-level to phrase-level morphosyntax. I hope for this thesis to provide a base to accelerate the research towards that direction and to be of assistance to those who would like to work on Nanosyntax with a focus on Turkish morphosyntax.