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Relative Clauses in L2 Turkish
Authors: Aslı Altan
Number of views: 668
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.