On Properties and Boundries Between Inflectional and Derivational Suffixes in Turkish

In traditional grammars in Turkish, there is no consensus on the class of some derivational and inflectional suffixes. In this article, the criteria of obligatoriness, syntactic relevance, change of syntactic category, paradigms and etc. which distinguish between inflectional and derivational suffixes are examined by looking at linguistic works especially morphological studies. When the criteria which distinguish between inflectional and derivational suffixes are applied to inflectional categories it is observed that some suffixes belong to the basic inflectional categories and some suffixes bear both the characteristics of inflectional and derivational categories. The fact that there is not a sharp division between some suffixes can be explained by the continuum approach. Inflectional categories can be studied in terms of contextual and inherent inflection.