Compound Formation in Karachay-Balkar: Implications for the marker –sI

Abstract

This paper discusses morphological, phonological, semantic and syntactic properties of compound formation in Karachay-Balkar with a special focus on Noun-Noun compounds which surface with or without marker –sI and sheds new light on compound formation in Turkish. In line with Öztürk and Taylan (2016), we suggest that –sI signals the presence of an argument being the head of functional head nP. Karachay-Balkar is more restrictive than Turkish in that –sI surfaces only with nouns that are inherently transitive. In this paper we also focus on the function of –sI in genitive possessive constructions. Drawing on compounds in Karachay-Balkar and Turkish, we conclude that although –sI introduces an argument in both genitive possessive constructions and compounds, what appears on the head noun in genitive possessive constructions is possessive agreement marker on a par with first and second person agreement markers.

Keywords

• Karachay-Balkar
• compounds
• lexical relations
• genitive-possessive constructions