Although most researchers recognise that the language repertoire of bilinguals can vary, few studies have tried to address variation in bilingual competence in any detail. This study aims to take a first step towards further understanding of the way in which bilingual competencies can vary at the level of syntax by comparing the use of syntactic embeddings among three different groups of Turkish-German bilinguals. The approach of the present article is new in that different groups of bilinguals are compared with each other, and not only with monolingual speakers, as is common in most studies in the field. The analysis focuses on differences in the use of different types of embeddings in Turkish, which are generally considered to be one of the more complex aspects of Turkish grammar. The study shows that young Turkish-German bilingual adults who were born and raised in Germany use fewer, and less complex embeddings than Turkish-German bilingual returnees who had lived in Turkey for eight years at the time of recording. The present study provides new insights in the nature of bilingual competence, as well as a new perspective on syntactic change in immigrant Turkish as spoken in Europe.

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This paper explores the morphosyntactic tools for text watermarking and develops a syntax-based natural language watermarking scheme. Turkish, an agglutinative language, provides a good ground for the syntax-based natural language watermarking with its relatively free word order possibilities and rich repertoire of morphosyntactic structures. The unmarked text is first transformed into a syntactic tree diagram in which the syntactic hierarchies and the functional dependencies are coded. The watermarking software then operates on the sentences in syntax tree format and executes binary changes under control of Wordnet to avoid semantic drops. The key-controlled randomization of morphosyntactic tool order and the insertion of void watermark provide a certain level of security. The embedding capacity is calculated statistically, and the imperceptibility is measured .using edit hit counts.

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This paper discusses the effect of animacy of DP arguments and their availability as referents of the implicit subjects of impersonal passive constructions involving unergative and unaccusative predicates. A three way distinction between the sources of animacy effects in language is proposed-inherent, teleological and inherited. Only those DPs that refer to inherently animate entities are accessible as referents of the implicit subjects of impersonal passive constructions. The paper also proposes a syntactic analysis of a construction that is closely related to animacy-the psych verb constructions in Turkish.