Relative Clauses in L2 Turkish

Journal Title: Mersin Üniversitesi Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi - Year 2016, Vol 13, Issue 1

Abstract

Relative clauses in Turkish (Haig, 1997; Hankamer & Knect, 1976) and their acquisition in first language (L1) Turkish (Slobin, 1986; Ekmekçi, 1990; Özcan, 1997; Özge et al, 2010) has been the topic of many studies. The aim of this study is to analyze the relative clause (RC) constructions used by participants who speak Turkish as a foreign language. The results of this study reveal that L2 Turkish speakers use fewer RC structures compared to L1 speakers. An analysis of written and oral data collected from L2 speakers show that they used more subject RCs, whereas native speakers use more object RCs. These findings support the Structural Distance Hypothesis, which predicts that subject RCs are easier to process than object RCs since fewer boundaries intervene between the gap and the head.

Authors and Affiliations

Aslı Altan

Keywords

Related Articles

Colligational Patterns of Turkish Multi-Word Units

In multi-word unit (MWU) extraction studies, most of the challenges for rich morphology languages like Turkish can be overcome by the study of how colligational filtering works in our minds, along with how statistical an...

Conceptualizations of CİĞER 'Liver-Lung' in Turkish Figurative Expressions

This study investigates the conceptualizations of the body part term ciğer (liver-lung) as it is used in idioms figuratively from the cognitive linguistic perspective. Data are collected from several dictionaries, and th...

Multi-word Expressions in Genre Specification

Corpus analyses of lexical structures have uncovered different functions that they come to serve in textual organisation. Frequently occurring patterns of lexical items, the multi-word units, display different distributi...

Hayır and Yok as Pragmatic Markers in Turkish: Findings from Spoken Turkish Corpus

Pragmatic markers (PM) are linguistic items in “talk-in-interaction” performing not only functions peculiar to that grammatical category but also various pragmatic functions such as topic shift, coherence, turn taking st...

Drama, Minorities and The Ottoman Empire

The birth of ‘Turkic Drama’ within the dramatic rise of nationalist eulogy is, as opposed to popular belief, principally grounded on the theatric activities of ethnic and religious minorities in a non-Western society, th...

Download PDF file
  • EP ID EP198118
  • DOI -
  • Views 132
  • Downloads 0

How To Cite

Aslı Altan (2016). Relative Clauses in L2 Turkish. Mersin Üniversitesi Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi, 13(1), 1-37. https://europub.co.uk/articles/-A-198118