Disentangling Words, Clitics, and Suffixes in Uyghur

Abstract

Turkic languages have been shown to form words using a wide range of word-formation strategies, such as suffixation, cliticization, and auxiliaries. The present paper offers a detailed description of word formation in Uyghur, compares the patterns in Uyghur with the prior literature on Turkic, offers explicit diagnostics for suffixes and clitics, and proposes a morpho-syntactic analysis for each strategy.

Keywords

• head movement
• word formation
• clitic
• suffix
• auxiliary
• Uyghur