Converbs in heritage Turkish: A contrastive approach

Abstract

Turkish expresses adverbial subordination predominantly by means of converb clauses. These are headed by nonfinite verbs, i.e. converbs, which have a converb suffix attached to the stem. The different converbs express different aspectual relations between the subordinate and the superordinate clause, and they can be modifying or non-modifying. We analyse data from speakers of Turkish as a heritage language in Germany and the U.S. as well as monolingual speakers of Turkish in Turkey. The data come from two age groups: adults and adolescents. We show that unlike in canonical Turkish, converbs in heritage Turkish can be multifunctional, meaning that they can express both simultaneity and causality, for example. Furthermore, we show that converbs in heritage Turkish can be both modifying and non-modifying. As possible factors which might be responsible for such variation, we discuss language contact, sociolinguistic differences between the speaker communities (Germany vs. the U.S.) and age of the speakers.

Exploring individual variation in Turkish heritage speakers’ complex linguistic productions: Evidence from discourse markers

“…Most importantly, we labeled this variable as Country, which is short for Country of Elicitation. This helps us to address several distinctions that previous discussion around community cohesiveness and vitality have evoked (Iefremenko et al, 2021;Yagmur, 2011). It is a distinction that is not based on mono-versus bilingualism, but it rather captures the everyday linguistic practices of these groups.…”

“…For our analysis of DMs, this means that a large portion of them will produce as many discourse and FMs as monolingual speakers. We based this prediction on other studies that were able to attribute changes in heritage grammars to certain individuals in the groups (Goschler et al, 2020; Iefremenko et al, 2021; Özsoy et al, 2022). Our careful analysis of individual variation will be able to locate these speakers and adequately allocate between-group differences to those speakers.…”

Exploring individual variation in Turkish heritage speakers’ complex linguistic productions: Evidence from discourse markers

“…For our analysis of 1 https://osf.io/5mwrn/?view_only=c7f9e8efdfb2413ab2d3483deb3d4402 DMs, this means that a large portion of them will produce as many discourse and fluency markers as monolingual speakers. We based this prediction on other studies that were able to attribute changes in heritage grammars to certain individuals in the groups (Goschler et al, 2020;Iefremenko et al, 2021). Often, while the groups do not show any significant differences and the effect of group is marginally small, certain speakers who overuse a certain structure will make the group differences stand out.…”