On Single Argument Verbs in Turkish

The article discusses how split intransitivity phenomenon is observed in Turkish in terms of aspectual notions such as agentivity and telicity; different grammatical constructions such as impersonal passives and adjectival passives, and derivational morphology. It observes that agentivity is the key factor affecting split intransitivity in Turkish alongside telicity and these determine the unaccusative-unergative distinction of verbs of manner of motion, verbs of emission and reflexive verbs in Turkish. The article proposes that verbs of emission seem to be unaccusative while reflexives behave more like unergatives. Our findings imply that variable behavior of intransitive verbs can be handled under an event structure analysis where different functional heads give theta role to a NP merged in their domain. Thus, there is no need for a lexical derivation or rule for accounting the facts on unaccusativity