Asymmetric Coordination in Turkish

Abstract

In this paper, we examine the syntax and semantics of the clausal coordinator DA in Turkish. Observing that temporal and causal interpretations associated with this morpheme cannot be analyzed as implicatures in the Gricean sense, we claim that this coordinator is intrinsically asymmetric. Building on Bjorkman's analysis (2010, 2013) that coordination at the TP level is always asymmetric, we suggest that DA can only be used for coordination at the TP level and provide independent evidence for this claim. We finally discuss two alternatives to Bjorkman's analysis, the temporal asymmetry approach of Bar-Lev & Palacas (1993) and the discourse-relational approach of Txurruka (2003), and show that these two alternatives fail to explain the relation between the syntactic distribution and the semantic properties of DA.