@inproceedings{turk-etal-2026-frequency,
    title = "Frequency modulates structural choice in {T}urkish suspended affixation: a latent-process account",
    author = {Turk, Utku  and
      Neu, Eva  and
      Bakay, {\"O}zge  and
      Dillon, Brian  and
      Jarosz, Gaja},
    editor = "Voigt, Rob  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Feldman, Naomi  and
      Linzen, Tal",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, CA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.32/",
    pages = "343--352",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-412-5",
    abstract = "Suspended affixation (SA) allows a suffix on one conjunct to scope over all coordinated elements. While inflectional SA is productive in Turkish, derivational SA is claimed to be highly restricted; yet speakers readily accept certain cases. We propose that this gradient acceptability reflects a frequency-modulated choice between two possible syntactic representations: base-generation, which licenses derivational SA, and ellipsis. To test this, we conducted a rating task on the acceptability of four derivational suffixes in SA form while manipulating the frequency of coordinations. Using a Multinomial Processing Tree model to isolate latent structural choices from surface ratings, we found that frequency modulated SA acceptability for some suffixes (i.e., sIz `-less' and cI `-maker'), but not others (i.e., lI `-having' and lIk `-for'). These findings suggest that frequency shapes syntactic parsing in morphologically complex environments."
}