The paper examines the grammatical behavior of the negative element used to negate predicates in non-verbal clauses in three Turkic languages: Azerbaijani, Kyrgyz, and Turkish. We focus on its interaction with verbal copulas, subject agreement, and the distribution of agreement suffixes, as well as its position within the predicate phrase. The study draws on both previously described corpus data and newly collected examples. Across all three languages, agreement features are realised on the negative element only in the absence of an overt copula. The agreement morphology involved is identical to that found with nominal, adjectival, and adverbial predicates. In all the languages examined, the negative element remains within the predicate phrase; thus, its position is syntactically constrained. At the same time, we observe differences among the languages in the degree to which the position of the negator is fixed within the predicate. In Turkish and Azerbaijani, regardless of which element of the nominal predicate it negates, the negator invariably follows the predicate. In Kyrgyz, by contrast, it consistently appears immediately after the element it negates within the predicate. These patterns suggest that the negative element behaves syntactically as a phrasal operator associated with non-verbal predicates. For annotation purposes, we therefore propose analysing the negative element as a negation modifier, assigning it the POS tag ADV and the dependency relation advmod:neg.

Identifying units, ’syntactic words’, for morphosyntactic analysis is important yet challenging for morphologically rich languages. In this paper we propose a set of guiding principles to determine units of morphosyntactic analysis, and apply them to the case of copular constructions in Turkic languages, in the context of Universal Dependencies (UD) framework. We also provide a survey of the practice in the Turkic UD treebanks published to date, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the proposed tokenisation for a selection of Turkic languages.