Turkic participant nominals, glossed 〈pn〉, refer to participants in actions and are derived by means of specific markers. They can be used without a syntactic head, e.g. Altay käl-gän ‘who/which has come’, Turkish ‹duy|duğ|um› ‘what I hear/heard’, ‹gel|en› ‘somebody/something coming/having come’. They can also be used adnominally, as attributes in nominal phrases, e.g. Altay käl-gän kiži ‘a/the person who has come’, Turkish ‹duy|duğ|um ses› ‘a/the sound I hear/heard’, ‹gel|en posta› ‘incoming mail’. In both functions, they may function as the nucleus of a relative clause. There is no reason to assume that the headless use is diachronically secondary to the attributive use.