Mersin University Journal of Linguistics and Literature (Mersin Üniversitesi Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi

1-37

Authors: Aslı Altan

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.

71-94

Authors: Aydın Özbek & Barış Kahraman

Turkish has two different forms of reflexive pronouns: kendi (self) and kendisi (self-3sg). In the field of theoretical linguistics, there are different views regarding the binding relations of these reflexives. One view is that kendi and kendisi can be bound with both the subject of the embedded clause and the subject of the matrix clause. According to another view, kendi is more likely to be bound with the subject of the embedded clause, whereas kendisi can be bound with either the subject of the embedded clause or the subject of the matrix clause. In order to provide evidence for the reflexive interpretation and confirm the validity of existing linguistic analyses in Turkish, we conducted a forced preference task with 64 native speakers of Turkish. Our findings suggest that the interpretations of kendi and kendisi are different in Turkish and that kendi is much freer than kendisi.