Kendi Reflexivization In Turkish

Author : Hasan Sezer
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (124 download)

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Download or read book Puzzling Reflexive Kendi in Turkish and Its Implications for the Parser written by Hasan Sezer and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis investigates the Turkish reflexive kendi theoretically and experimentally. First, I formally examine the puzzling distribution of the bare reflexive kendi in Turkish focusing on its morphological person feature composition. Building on the cross-linguistic evidence that 3P is unmarked for person feature, I argue that 3P kendi can form a long-distance binding relation in certain sentence embeddings such as nominalized clauses via LF head-raising to matrix clause domain. Then, coindexing with any non-person referent resolves the referential deficiency for 3P reflexive. On the other hand, 1P/2P reflexives, kendim and kendin, check their referential deficiency locally in the narrow syntax with a phi-agreeing antecedent. Specifically, I propose that 1P/2P reflexives enter into the derivation with unvalued [Speaker] and [Participant] features respectively and are involved in an Agree operation with a local licensor before Spell-out, otherwise the derivation crashes. Thus, I argue that 1P/2P reflexives are local anaphors in all contexts. Then, evidence from judgment surveys is presented to shed light on the reported non-person reflexive judgments in the literature. Offline data have shown that non-local interpretation for 3P kendi is attested in non-finite subordinate clauses. Contrastively, speakers dominantly prefer local antecedent for 3P kendi in finite embedded clauses, hence it abides by Principle A of Binding Theory. The final part of the thesis investigates the real-time processing of non-person reflexive in object relative clauses and adverbial clauses, where the linear distance of potential antecedents differs. I found that the parser is susceptible to interference from the animacy matching distractor referent (Experiment 3) as well as the linear position information of the distractor (Experiment 4). The findings suggest that semantic and surface-string information rather than syntactic information can act as retrieval cues in constructing dependency for the Turkish reflexive. Also, the evidence provides support for the standard cue-based retrieval mechanism (Chen et al., 2012; Jaeger et al., 2015b; Patil et al., 2016) rather than the structured access model (Dillon, 2011, 2013 et al.,). The online data from kendi fits the overall real-time dependency resolution in various syntactic domains such as subject-verb agreement, filler-gap, and NPIs, as formulated in content addressable memory architecture (McElree, 2000, 2003).