[This is part of a series of defectivity case studies.]

Thanks to correspondence with one of the authors I recently became aware of another possible paradigm gap in Turkish. According to İleri & Demirok (2022), henceforth ID, Turkish speakers are uncertain about the form of 3rd person plural desideratives. In this language, desideratives are deverbal nominals which select for and agree with a genitive subject. The desiderative suffix is /-AsI-/, where the capital letters mark archiphonemes subject to root harmony, and the 3rd person plural (3pl;.) possessive agreement suffix is /-lArI/. However, according to ID’s survey, Turkish speakers rate 3pl. desideratives formed from the root plus /-AsI-lArI/ as quite poor, and 3pl. desideratives are exceeding rare in corpora, even compared to other desiderative forms.

ID relate this observation to something unexpected about the 3rd person singular (3sg.) desiderative. Desideratives select, and agree with, a genitive subject, and the ordinary 3sg. genitive agreement suffix is /-sI/, but the 3sg. desiderative, there is apparently a haplology and we get just /-AsI/ (e.g., yapası, the 3sg. desiderative of ‘do’) instead of the expected */-AsI-sI/. They suggest that speakers may have reanalyzed /-AsI/ as a desiderative allomorph /-A/ followed by a 3sg. agreement suffix /-sI/, and thus predict that the 3pl. desiderative will be expressed by /-A-lArI/, though this is also judged to be quite bad (thus *yapasıları but also *yapaları). However, it is not immediately clear to me why ID expect speakers to hypothesize that the 3sg. desiderative allomorph should generalize to the 3pl.

This has a rather different flavor than the other defectivity case studies I’ve presented thus far. It could be that there simply are not enough desideratives in this person/number slot in the input, but I still don’t see what could be objectionable about /-AsI-lArI/. Another mystery is that their judgment task finds an unexplained very low acceptability for 2nd person plural desideratives (which seem to be of the form /-AsI-n/).

References

İleri, M. & Demirok, Ö. 2022. A paradigm gap in Turkish. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic 7, pages 1-15.