The Turkic middle voice system: deponency and paradigm reorganization

Abstract The goal of this paper is to recharacterize the distribution of two suffixes in Common Turkic, the reflexive -(I)n and the reciprocal -(I)š. Despite having quite distinct sources (the former as a suffix employed in the derivation of intransitive verbs, the latter a plural marker), these two suffixes have fallen into a somewhat overlapping distribution in the modern Turkic languages. They share a range of middle-like functions, and so they are characterized here as a bipartite middle voice system. Many of these functions have become peripheral, however, and the system increasingly consists of a class of verbs with deponent paradigms.