The interaction of contextual and syntactic information in the processing of Turkish anaphors

Abstract

In contrast with languages where anaphors can be classified into pronouns and reflexives, Turkish has a tripartite system that consists of the anaphors "o", "kendi", and "kendisi". The syntactic literature on these anaphors has proposed that whereas "o" behaves like a pronoun and "kendi" behaves like a reflexive, "kendisi" has a more flexible behavior and it can function as both a pronoun and a reflexive. Using acceptability judgments and a self-paced reading task, we examined how Turkish anaphors are processed in isolated sentences and within larger discourse contexts. We manipulated contextual information by creating passages where the context favored a local, long-distance or extra-sentential referent prior to the appearance of the anaphor. We measured the effect of the context on participants' reading times and their end-of-trial coreference assignments. Our results suggest that contextual information affects the interpretive possibilities associated with an anaphor, but that the influence of context depends on the degree to which the anaphor is syntactically constrained.

The interpretation of syntactically unconstrained anaphors in Turkish heritage speakers

“…Further, they showed a complementary profile with reflexives, by dispreferring extra-sentential antecedents and preferring local and longdistance antecedents for kendisi and, to a lower extent, kendi as well. This finding is consistent with previous findings with Turkish monolinguals, which showed that kendi and kendisi both admit local and long-distance antecedents (Gračanin-Yuksek et al, 2017;Özbek and Kahraman, 2016). However, in contrast with the study by Gračanin-Yuksek and colleagues (2017), heritage speakers were also more likely to select long-distance antecedents with kendisi than with kendi, showing some distinction between these anaphors.…”

“…We followed the same data cleaning procedures as Gračanin-Yuksek et al (2017). Only participants with more than 70% accuracy in the filler trials were entered into the analysis (Lago et al, 2015;Parker et al, 2015).…”

“…As in Gračanin-Yuksek et al (2017), the regions of interest consisted of the embedded verb and following regions. Note that due to Turkish word order, the verb region was the first point where participants could assess the compatibility between the target sentence and the preceding context (e.g., Emre Cem kendi blame….).…”

“…More specifically, given the increased complexity of computing dependencies over larger licensing domains, as well as the empirical patterns observed in previous work, we predicted heritage speakers to favor local antecedents for kendisi. This should potentially also result in a preference towards local reference for kendi, thus eliminating the acceptability of long-distance binding previously observed in monolingual speakers (Gračanin-Yuksek et al, 2017;Ozbek and Kahraman, 2016). Finally, the anaphor o was not predicted to undergo any changes in the heritage grammar given the existence of a corresponding form in German.…”

“…We examine whether Turkish heritage speakers living in Germany simplify their anaphor system by assimilating it to the syntactic categories of the societally-dominant language, German, or whether they preserve the distinctions even under heritage language conditions. Our study builds on a previous study on the processing of Turkish anaphors, which examined how Turkish monolinguals interpreted kendi, kendisi, and o in an offline antecedent selection task and also during reading comprehension, using a self-paced reading task (Gračanin-Yuksek et al, 2017).…”