This work is renowned for its near-exhaustive survey of the syntactic and morphological systems of Turkish and is considered the major successor to Turkish-language descriptive grammars of G.L.

[11] [12] Her work provided a thorough investigation of the syntactical and morphological properties of Turkish and defining its key typological features and universal characteristics.

As she explains in the preface, "[a]nother unusual feature of this book, and especially of the syntax chapter, is probably the fact that shadings of grammaticality or acceptability are noted, rather than reflecting an all-or-nothing approach".

She notes that Turkish was written in Arabic script from the beginning of its history in the Anatolian peninsula, until its orthography was converted to the Latin alphabet following the language reforms of 1928, upon the establishment of the Republic of Turkey.

Given that even the Morphology chapter often describes syntactical properties, Kornfilt is primarily interested in the syntax of Turkish:[13] Ch 1.

"Lexicon": 16 pages "Syntax" and "Morphology" Across sixteen subparts, the chapter surveys aspects of Turkish syntax: sentence types, subordination, internal sentence structures, phrasal units, negation, anaphora, reflexives, reciprocals, comparative constructions, equatives, possessive constructions, yes–no questions, question-word questions, questions in coordinate structures, means of expressing emphasis, topic, movement processes, and word classes.

A notable innovation of Kornfilt's syntax is observation of the relationship of the palatal glide [y] to copula and auxiliary word classes.

She specifies how Turkic languages share similar features, including vowel harmony, agglutinative morphology, verb-final word order, and nominalised subordinate clauses.

While Turkish adopted the Latin script following the writing reforms of 1928, there are a few changes that the Republic of Turkey made in the characterizations of letters.

for the front, I for the back, high non-round vowel...Other letters that don’t correspond to the familiar phonetic symbols are the following: c for [j], ç for [č], ş for [š], j for [ž]".

The only prefixing operation in Turkish is the intensification of adjectives and adverbs, via the reduplication of the first syllable and the addition of a consonant: e.g. beyaz 'white', bembeyaz 'completely white'; çabuk 'fast', çarçabuk 'very fast'"[3].

More specifically, she surveys: NP-Movement Kornfilt has also contributed to understanding of the Government and Binding theory originally proposed by Chomsky.

Kornfilt asserts CP-transparency, as proposed by generative theory, in Turkish syntax and refutes the role of restructuring in constructions that violate clause-dependent government rules.

want-Pass-past 'The universities were wanted to be surrounded by the police' (Sentence 2) üniversite-ler (polis tarafından) kuşat-ıl-mağ-a başla-n-dı university-pl.

begin-Pass-past 'The universities were begun to be surrounded by the police' (Sentence 3) üniversite-ler (polis tarafından) kuşat-ıl-mağ-a çalış-ıl-dı university-pl.

try-past 'The police tried to surround the universities' Kornfilt claims that while IDPs in other languages can normally be explained by Exceptional Case Marking (ECM), the ECM does not operate in Turkish—or, at least, it does not operate in the way that would explain the anomaly of non-local, cross-clausal rule application demonstrated by Turkish IDPs.

Her proposal links this CP-Transparency phenomenon to the traditional effects of S-bar Deletion in that the ‘offending’ trace in embedded subject position is now properly governed by the main verb and is saved from violating the [Empty Category Principle].

[16] Harbert presented various case studies that demonstrated various degrees of relaxed government rules from several languages, with some grammars allowing occasional exceptions to the rule and other grammars adopting non-standard treatment of structure effectively minimize the syntactic distance between the related elements without movement”.

[16] In effect, Harbert attempted to minimize the novelty of Kornfilt's Turkish IDPs by presenting cases of non-local government abnormalities in other languages.

Additionally, Kornfilt demonstrates that CED is insufficient in explaining features of Turkish, especially those involving with structural Case.

[17] As an alternative, Kornfilt suggests that syntactic incorporation of N's into verbs provides a better account of scrambling in Turkish than CED.

The caveat of this perspective is that it assumes that the case suffix marks a direct object if it is too similar to an "archetypical subject".

Alternatively, Kornfilt insists that the suffix explicitly indicates specificity under certain morpho-syntactic conditions, instead of a mere contrast to the subject.