Second Language Acquisition of Turkish [1 ed.] 9789027267078, 9789027253224

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Second Language Acquisition of Turkish Language Acquisition & Language Disorders

Edited by Ay¸se Gürel

XX 59

John Benjamins Publishing Company

Second Language Acquisition of Turkish

Language Acquisition and Language Disorders (LALD) issn 2213-428X Volumes in this series provide a forum for research contributing to theories of language acquisition (first and second, child and adult), language learnability, language attrition and language disorders. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/lald

Series Editors Roumyana Slabakova

University of Southampton and University of Iowa

Lydia White

McGill University

Editorial Board Kamil Ud Deen

Mabel Rice

Katherine Demuth

Luigi Rizzi

Naama Friedmann

Petra Schulz

Heather Goad

Bonnie D. Schwartz

Barbara Höhle

Antonella Sorace

Nina Hyams

Ianthi Maria Tsimpli

University of Hawaii at Manoa Macquarie University Tel Aviv University McGill University University of Potsdam University of California at Los Angeles

Jürgen M. Meisel

University of Calgary

Volume 59 Second Language Acquisition of Turkish Edited by Ayşe Gürel

University of Kansas University of Siena Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität University of Hawaii at Manoa University of Edinburgh University of Cambridge

Second Language Acquisition of Turkish Edited by

Ayşe Gürel Bo˘gaziçi University

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/lald.59 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2016007677 (print) / 2016018483 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 5322 4 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6707 8 (e-book)

© 2016 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Company · https://benjamins.com

Table of contents

Introduction: Linguistic aspects of Turkish as a second language Ayşe Gürel

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Part I.  The acquisition of L2 phonology Chapter 1 Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody: The effects of purely phonological and phonosyntactic issues  Öner Özçelik Chapter 2 Decreasing dependence on orthography in phonological development: Evidence from vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage Öner Özçelik and Rex A. Sprouse

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Part II.  The acquisition of L2 morpho-syntax Chapter 3 The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish: Evidence from Greek learners Hasan Kaili, Aytaç Çeltek and Despina Papadopoulou Chapter 4 The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish under the Feature Reassembly Approach Silvina Montrul Chapter 5 Someone judges every sentence: Third language acquisition of quantifier scope in Turkish Sıla Ay and Özgür Aydın

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107

135

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Second Language Acquisition of Turkish

Chapter 6 Syntax/semantics/pragmatics of yes/no questions in second language Turkish Martina Gračanin-Yuksek and Bilal Kırkıcı

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Part III.  The acquisition of L2 discourse/pragmatics Chapter 7 Cross-linguistic effects in the use of suggestion formulas by L2 Turkish learners Yasemin Bayyurt and Leyla Martı Chapter 8 Explicit apologies in L2 Turkish Çiler Hatipoğlu

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Part IV.  The processing of L2 morpho-syntax Chapter 9 Processing morphology in L2 Turkish: The effects of morphological richness in the L1 Serkan Uygun and Ayşe Gürel Chapter 10 Non-native syntactic processing of Case and Agreement: Evidence from event-related potentials Özgür Aydın, Mehmet Aygüneş and Tamer Demiralp Chapter 11 Structural priming in L2 Turkish: A study on possessive noun phrases and noun clauses Gözde Mercan

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Conclusion: Emerging issues in the acquisition of L2 Turkish and pedagogical considerations Ayşe Gürel

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Index

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Introduction Linguistic aspects of Turkish as a second language Ayşe Gürel

Boğaziçi University

This book brings together the findings of current studies on the acquisition Turkish as a second language (L2). The fact that Turkish is a under-researched language in the context of second language acquisition (SLA), combined with the need to address theoretical issues which have largely been overlooked in studies on Turkish language learning/teaching, have provided the motivation for compiling such a volume. Comprising studies on various domains of L2 grammar (i.e. phonology, morpho-syntax, pragmatics) and their interfaces, this volume also includes studies exploring L2 processing of Turkish morpho-­ syntax. All studies in this collection involve only adult L2 Turkish learners. Language development in child or adult heritage language speakers, however interesting and revealing, is not covered in the present volume. Although Turkish is generally learned as an additional foreign language after a second or third foreign language, either in or outside Turkey, the term ‘L2 Turkish’ is adopted as an umbrella term in most of the research presented here. Before introducing each study and its theoretical contribution to the field of SLA in general and to L2 Turkish in particular, I would like to present a brief note on the Turkish language, its L2 status, and its linguistic properties as these relate to the issues discussed in this book.

1. Speakers of Turkish around the world Turkish belongs to the Altaic branch of the Uralic-Altaic language family. This relates Turkish to, for example, Finnish in the Uralic group and to Japanese and Korean in the Altaic group (Kornfilt 2009). Turkish is the largest (in terms of number of speakers) in the Turkic family of languages spoken over a large geographical area in Asia (Kornfilt 2009: 519).1 It is the official and dominant language of the 1. These geographical areas (and the Turkic languages) include the former Soviet Union and Iran: the Caucasus and northwestern Iran (e.g. Azerbaijani), Kazakhstan and southern Siberia doi 10.1075/lald.59.01gur © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Republic of Turkey, where it is the native language of over 90 percent of the population, which, according to the Turkish Statistical Institute 2014 report, exceeds 77 million. The largest linguistic minority in Turkey is formed by Kurdish speakers. Other minority language communities include speakers of Arabic and several Caucasian languages (Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kornfilt 2009). A large number of these minority language speakers are bilingual, a condition conducive to future cross-linguistic research into the acquisition of Turkish in the context of early bilingualism. I hope this book will pioneer further work on both early and late bilingualism, pairing Turkish with other minority languages spoken in Turkey. Turkish is the language spoken at home in a number of Balkan countries such as Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Greece, Macedonia and Romania. In Cyprus (particularly in the North), Turkish is a co-official language alongside Greek. Germany and other European countries as well as the United States of America and Australia have large numbers of Turkish speakers, who constitute the population of 65 million Turkish speakers living outside the Republic of Turkey (Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kornfilt 2009). 2. The status of Turkish as an L2 Although there are no official statistics revealing the exact number of L2 Turkish learners in and outside Turkey, recent years have witnessed a growing international interest in learning Turkish as an L2. This emerging interest has been officially recognized and encouraged at the governmental level in a number of countries. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs’ declaration of Turkish as one of the thirteen critical foreign languages needed for improving social, cultural, and political relations has generated a demand for trained and proficient speakers of the language. Furthermore, through student exchange programs, university students from North America, Europe, Middle East, and the Far East come to Turkey in ever-increasing numbers for at least a semester, and enroll in L2 Turkish courses. In addition, government-funded and internationally-­ sponsored institutions outside Turkey offer Turkish language courses at various proficiency levels for different learner populations ranging from child and adult heritage learners to adult L2 Turkish learners. It is also significant to note that a number of Turkish universities have opened graduate programs in ‘Teaching L2 (e.g. Uzbek, Kazakh, Turkmen, Kirghiz), the Volga (e.g. Tatar), and northern Siberia (e.g. Yakut). There are also large Turkic-speaking communities in northwestern China (especially Uighur, and also Kazakh) (Kornfilt 2009: 519).

Introduction 3

Turkish’, aiming at the development of prospective L2 Turkish teachers and/or academicians working in this field. Coordinated efforts to produce theoretical and empirical work on the acquisition and teaching of L2 Turkish are therefore urgently needed. Accumulating theory-informed research findings on L2 Turkish is a necessary condition towards this aim. To my knowledge, this book will be the first book addressing theoretical issues in adult L2 acquisition of Turkish which is available to international readership. 3. A note on Turkish grammar As discussed in different chapters in the volume, Turkish has numerous interesting linguistic characteristics that are conducive to the testing of different views/ models on the development of interlanguage grammars. Turkish is generally considered a textbook case of an agglutinative language with rich, regular inflectional and derivational systems based exclusively on suffixation.2 Suffixation can create long words that would sometimes correspond to an entire sentence in English. In the nominal domain, nouns can be marked with possessive, plural, and Case morphemes. Turkish has six Cases: nominative, accusative, dative, locative, ablative, and genitive. With the exception of the nominative, all Cases are marked overtly with distinct suffixes. Case is marked on nouns, pronouns, and nominalized verbs. Other nominal inflectional markers include the comitative/instrumental form (see Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 67–69 for the complete list). Turkish does not have grammatical gender. In the volume, Case and plural morphology are of relevance to the processing study reported in the Uygun and Gürel article. More information on nominal inflection can be found in their chapter. Verbs carry tense, aspect, modality, voice, negation, and person markers. The tense morphemes include definite past: -DI; reported past: -mIş; aorist: -(A)r; future: -(y)AcAK; present progressive: -(I)yor (Kornfilt 2009: 528). Each of these forms also has aspectual connotations. A complete discussion on Turkish Tense-­ Aspect-Modality is presented in the chapter by Kaili, Çeltek, and Papadopoulou. Voice suffixes include causative, passive, reflexive, and reciprocal suffixes, which normally come immediately after the verb root, preceding all other suffixes. Two classes of causative verbs (change of state verbs with agentive subjects and 2. Prefixes are limited to reduplication (i.e. reduplication of the first syllable in intensifying adjectives and adverbs; e.g. beyaz ‘white’, bembeyaz ‘completely white’) and there are also a few unproductive prefixes of foreign origin (Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kornfilt 2009).

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psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects) are discussed in the chapter by Montrul. The verbal negation marker is -mA and it occurs post-verbally. Turkish verbs carry agreement suffixes that show agreement with their subjects in terms of number (singular, plural) and person (first, second, and third). As discussed in the chapter by Aydın, Aygüneş and Demiralp, there are different morphological paradigms used for verbal and nominal agreement. The first of these paradigms (sometimes referred to as the ‘k-paradigm’) involves agreement morphemes attaching only to verbs ending with -DI and -sA affixes. The second paradigm (known as the ‘z-paradigm’) has suffixes attaching to the rest of the tense affixes. The third paradigm is used with the imperative, while the fourth involves nominal agreement markers on the nouns of possessive constructions, on the verbs of noun clauses, and on the verbs of relative clauses. Some sources also assume a separate paradigm for optative forms (Yavuz & Balcı 2011). In terms of nominal agreement, it is important to note that in genitive-possessive constructions such as ‘my car’ (e.g. ben-im araba-m: I-GEN car-1SGPOSS), the first NP, marked with the genitive suffix, indicates the possessor while the second NP, marked with the possessive suffix, indicates the possessed. There is person agreement between the possessed NP and the possessor NP (e.g. *benim araba-n: I-GEN car-2SGPOSS). The same agreement morphemes are used in nominalized constructions (e.g. ben-im gel-me-m: I-GEN come-NOM-1SGPOSS vs. *ben-im gel-me-n: I-GEN come-NOM-2SGPOSS). The structural similarity between genitive-possessive constructions and nominalized constructions is an important feature of Turkish which has several syntactic implications (Gürel 2002). A more detailed discussion on these constructions can be found in Mercan’s chapter on structural priming. As for the phonological system, perhaps the most striking property of Turkish is vowel harmony, appearing word internally and externally, displaying two patterns: fronting harmony and rounding harmony. As discussed in Özçelik and Sprouse’s chapter, while the former case involves the assimilation of a vowel to the vowel in the preceding syllable in terms of frontness, the latter involves a high vowel harmonizing in roundness with the vowel in the preceding syllable (Göksel & Kerslake 2005). Turkish has 8 phonemic vowels (i, ü, ı, u, e, ö, a, o), which are categorized according to their [±back], [±high], and [±round] features (Kabak 2011; Kornfilt 2009). From the perspective of phonology, there are two types of suffixes in Turkish, I-type and A-type. The vowels of the I-type suffixes are high. They get their frontness and roundness features from the preceding vowel. Fronting and rounding harmonies determine whether the vowel in this type of suffix will be ‘i’, ‘ı’, ‘ü’, or ‘u’ when affixed to a particular word. The vowels of A-type suffixes are [–round]

Introduction 5

and [–high], but they can be [+back] or [–back]. The choice of the appropriate vowel in an A-type suffix depends on whether the vowel in the syllable preceding it is [+back] or [–back] (Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 22–23). Besides vowel harmony, Turkish exhibits consonant assimilation, which ensures that the stem consonant and the suffix consonant share the same voicing feature. For example, the past tense suffix -DI undergoes both vowel harmony and consonant assimilation (e.g. kes-ti ‘cut-PAST’; sat-tı ‘sell-PAST’ versus git-ti ‘go-PAST’; uyu-du ‘sleep-PAST’). Grapheme-phoneme correspondence is regular in Turkish – hence its categorization as an orthographically transparent language (Durgunoğlu & Öney 1999). Predictable alternations (e.g. those due to syllable-­ final oral stop devoicing) are represented in the spelling system. Other predictable alternations are not signaled. For example, since no special signs exist for the palatal versus velar /k, g and l/, the alternations that these segments undergo remain unexpressed by the orthography (Kornfilt 2009: 524). Sometimes the backness of a suffix vowel is determined by the lateral, rather than by the preceding vowel. As Özçelik and Sprouse show in the volume, in some borrowed words, a back vowel followed by a non-velarized /l/ (e.g. rol ‘role’), the suffix vowel harmonizes with the [–back] feature of the lateral, rather than with the [+back] feature of the vowel in the preceding syllable (e.g. role ‘to the role’ but not *rola). In contrast, words that have velarized /ɫ/ (e.g. yol /yoɫ/ ‘road’) follow canonical vowel harmony rules in suffixation (e.g. yola /yoɫa/ ‘to the road’ but not *yole). Turkish has, in general, word-final stress. Most suffixes in Turkish are stressable. When a stressable suffix is added to a stressed root, the position of the word stress moves to the new final syllable as in kitáp ‘book’, kitap-lár ‘books’, kitaplarım-dá ‘in my books’ (Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 29). Özçelik’s article provides a discussion of stress patterns in Turkish. Turkish is a head-final language with free-word order. The unmarked word order is SOV. Scrambling is allowed both preverbally and postverbally. Depending on pragmatic and discourse factors, the canonical order is altered. Topicalized constituents appear sentence-initially; new information or focused constituents are immediately in preverbal position (Erguvanlı-Taylan 1984). As an SOV language, where objects precede the verb, Turkish has postpositions rather than prepositions, and relative clauses that precede their heads. Specific objects (definite and indefinite), including pronouns and proper names, obligatorily bear overt case morphology and scramble freely, while non-specific objects do not have overt case morphology and occur in the immediately preverbal position (Erguvanlı-­Taylan 1984; Enç 1991; Kural 1992 among others). Also, as discussed in Ay and Aydın’s chapter, scrambling interacts, in interesting ways, with quantifier scope assignment in Turkish.

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Subject pronouns can be omitted in the presence of a fully inflected verb (e.g. Ben Istanbul’a gidiyorum or Istanbul’a gidiyorum ‘I am going to Istanbul’). Similarly, in the presence of the person agreement on the head noun, the genitive NP (possessor) can be dropped (Benim arabam or Arabam ‘My car’). Pro-drop can also be observed in embedded constructions. Turkish also allows object-drop in contexts where the discourse or pragmatic factors make the referent clear. Object omission is more limited than subject omission, however (Kornfilt 1997). In terms of question formation, Turkish has various wh-question particles. Due to its wh-in-situ characteristics, wh-phrases stay in their base-generated positions in main and embedded questions (see Akar 1990; Arslan 1999; Özsoy 1996 for different accounts of wh-in-situ in Turkish). Yes-no questions in Turkish are formed by suffixing the particle -mI to the constituent questioned. As illustrated by Gračanin-Yuksek and Kırkıcı, the positioning of the -mI particle is subject to various grammatical constraints in Turkish. In the field of Turkish pragmatics, as is the case in many other languages, speech acts have drawn more attention than other areas of pragmatics such conversational implicature, presupposition, reference, deixis, conversational analysis (see Slabakova 2013 for a review). Although the totality of pragmatic norms in Turkish has not been completely identified, it has been suggested, in the context of suggestions, for instance, that Turkish native speakers make their suggestions rather directly without much attempt to mitigate their message to minimize imposition (Bayraktaroğlu 2001; Bayyurt & Martı 2012). Similarly, in apology formulation, native speakers of Turkish are found to employ explicit expression of apology in most cases. A more detailed discussion of the pragmatic norms involved in suggestion- and apology-giving can be found in Bayyurt and Martı’s chapter and in the article by Hatipoğlu . The above-mentioned characteristics of Turkish are relevant for the studies included in this volume. Each chapter has an in-depth discussion of the relevant linguistic notions. Readers may also wish to consult other sources on Turkish grammar for more comprehensive coverage (Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kornfilt 1997; Ketrez 2012; Lewis 1967; Özsoy 2001; 2004; Underhill 1976; see also the contributions in Erguvanlı-Taylan 2002). 4. The papers in this volume The papers in this volume are grouped under four main headings according to the domain of grammar they focus on: L2 phonology, L2 morpho-syntax, L2 discourse/pragmatics, and the L2 processing of morpho-syntax. This organization is based purely on practical considerations; given the obvious interrelatedness of the

Introduction 7

different domains of grammar, this division should not be construed as a theoretical claim. Each chapter focuses on a particular linguistic domain, with different sets of research questions and different participants and methodologies to identify a specific aspect of L2 Turkish. A summary of each study is given below. 4.1

The acquisition of L2 phonology

As discussed above, Turkish phonology has particular characteristics that are conducive to a comprehensive exploration of interlanguage phonology. Nevertheless, L2 phonology is a relatively understudied field not only in the context of Turkish but also in other languages. The two papers in this section cover (a) the effects of phonological and phonosyntactic features in the acquisition of Turkish prosody (Özçelik’s chapter) and (b) phonological development in comparison to orthographic learning in English-Turkish interlanguage (Özçelik and Sprouse’s paper). In Chapter 1, Özçelik investigates, via two experiments, the acquisition of lower-­level (i.e. word-level) prosody, which involves only phonological representations, and higher-level (i.e. phrase- and sentence-level) prosody, which requires knowledge of both phonology and syntax. His first experiment involves a total of 19 first language (L1) English- and L1 French-speaking learners (with beginner, low-­intermediate, and advanced proficiency), who were shown pictures of target nouns of various lengths and syllable structures. They were asked to utter the words in isolation and then to repeat them in a carrier sentence. Özçelik’s prediction was based on the differences among the three languages: While Turkish and French are both footless languages, English is a foot-requiring language. In his second experiment, interviews were conducted with two L1-English-­speaking learners of Turkish with advanced L2 proficiency. Findings suggest that the acquisition of Turkish word-level prosody is challenging, particularly for L1-English speakers. At the sentence-level, however, L1-English speakers were able to use target-­like prosodic structures despite L1–L2 differences and misleading instruction that they had received on the sentential stress rule in Turkish. Özçelik suggests that the word-level prosodic system is difficult for learners with a footed L1 (i.e. English) acquiring an L2 without foot structure (i.e. Turkish) because this requires discarding the grammar of a prosodic constituent (i.e. the Foot). Target-­ like representations in higher-level prosody are accounted for on the basis of the Universal Grammar (UG) constraints available to L2 learners. In Chapter 2, Özçelik and Sprouse examine the role of L2 orthography in the development of L2 phonology. The investigation extends beyond the relatively standard relationship between orthography and the typical phonological rules of

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vowel harmony in Turkish. It involves special cases of word-external (i.e. suffix) harmony where the vowel of the suffix is not determined by the vowel of the root (as would be the case in regular vowel harmony processes), but instead by an exceptional consonant whose backness feature is not marked orthographically. The crucial issue here is that the application of the usually-taught vowel harmony rules would yield target language-deviant results because the backness of the consonant is not spelled out in any way in Turkish. By comparing trials with both orthographic and auditory stimuli against trials with auditory stimuli alone, the study attempts to differentiate L1 English learners’ reliance on orthography in the computation of Turkish vowel harmony rules. In addition to 8 native speakers of Turkish, 16 L2 learners at beginner (n = 6), intermediate (n = 5), and advanced (n = 5) levels of L2 proficiency were presented with a Turkish word or pseudo­ word (i.e. the root) and asked to choose the correct variant of a suffix from among two or four options (because a given suffix may be subject to either two-way or four-way vowel harmony). As predicted by the Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis, the results suggest that L2 learners gradually rely less on orthographic stimuli and more on auditory stimuli. 4.2

The acquisition of L2 morpho-syntax

This section features four studies exploring the acquisition of Turkish morpho-­ syntax. The first is a study by Kaili, Çeltek and Papadopoulou in Chapter 3 that addresses the acquisition of verbal morphology. They examine the acquisition of tense, aspect and modality (TAM) in Turkish by L1 Greek speakers. A total of 15 participants with intermediate and advanced L2 Turkish proficiency were given a fill-in-the-blank test and an elicited oral imitation task. The TAM morphemes investigated were -(I)yor (progressive aspect and present tense marker), -A/Ir (aorist suffix expressing imperfective aspect and generic meaning), -(y)AcAK (marker of future), -DI (past tense and perfective aspect marker) and -mIş (past tense and perfective aspect marker). The researchers attempted to identify the most problematic morphology within TAM. They assumed that since TAM markers are encoded in different ways cross-linguistically, L2 learners would have difficulty attaining language-specific properties. One-to-many mapping between TAM markers and their uses is believed to add to this difficulty. The results revealed that L2 learners experience more problems with modality than with tense or aspect. L2 learners’ use of tense markers, -DI and -(y)AcAK was found to be native-like. Similarly, their performance with -(I)yor and the aspectual meanings of -(A/I)r was relatively high. Nevertheless, learners exhibited problems with -(A/I)r and -mIş, which express mainly modal uses in Turkish. The authors consider the

Introduction 9

inherent functional characteristics (i.e. multifunctionality) of these two suffixes and L1 Greek influence as potential factors leading to these results. In Chapter 4, Montrul examines the acquisition of causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish. This particular paper is a shorter version of her 2001 publication in Second Language Research and it reports only on the Turkish study, reinterpreting the L2 Turkish data under the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (FRH) of Lardiere (2009). The issue under investigation is whether and how the relationship between the morphological characteristics (e.g. morphological typology and richness) of the L1 and the L2 might contribute to a learning problem during interlanguage development. Three L2 groups (L1-Spanish, n = 24; L1-English, n = 18; and L1-Japanese, n = 9), all with intermediate or high-intermediate Turkish proficiency, were tested and the results were compared with those of 18 native speakers of Turkish. Following the FRH, it was hypothesized that surface morphological errors would be constrained by the way the abstract features associated with (anti)causative morphology are phonologically spelled out in the L1; if the L1 has zero and the L2 has overt morphology to express these features, then L2 learners will assume that those features receive no phonological content in the L2, either. In the reverse case (i.e. overt morphology in the L1 and zero in the L2), then L2 learners will map these features onto morphophonological forms specific to the L2. A judgment task involving pictures and pairs of sentences with causative/inchoative and psych verbs revealed L1 effects, as L2 learners’ judgments were found to be constrained by the morphological patterns found in their respective L1s, as predicted by Lardiere’s FRH. In Chapter 5, Ay and Aydın explore the acquisition of quantifier scope in third language (L3) Turkish acquisition by native speakers of Japanese (n = 14) whose L2 was English. The study also included 14 Turkish native speakers. The authors emphasize the status of Turkish as the L3 because they focus on the transfer effects of L1 and L2 in L3 acquisition. A canonical SOV sentence such as ‘Biri (someone) her kedi-yi (evey cat-Acc) okşuyor (petting)’ has only surface scope reading, where a single person is petting all the cats. But the scrambled OSV version is ambiguous between the reading in which a single person is petting all the cats, and the reading in which every cat is petted by a different person. In both Japanese and Turkish, the inverse scope reading is possible only in OSV sentences (not in SOV sentences). The corresponding sentence in English (‘Someone is petting every cat’) is ambiguous between surface and inverse scope readings. Learners with intermediate-level proficiency were given a judgment task involving pictures and scope sentences. Similar to native speakers, the L3 group accepted subject-wide interpretations more than object-wide interpretations in SOV sentences. In OSV sentences, both groups correctly allowed both surface and inverse scope interpretations. However, the L3 group, unlike native speakers, showed a tendency to accept subject-wide

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scope over object-wide scope. This cannot be due to L1 Japanese effects because Japanese equally allows surface and inverse scope interpretations in OSV sentences. Similarly, L2 English influence is not relevant because L3 learners do not treat canonical sentences as ambiguous between surface and inverse scope interpretations. Thus, the findings reveal no particular L1 or L2 effects on L3 acquisition. In Chapter 6, Gračanin-Yuksek and Kırkıcı address the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of yes/no question formation in L2 Turkish. They discuss the intricate relationship and possible dissociation among different levels of grammatical representation in the L2 development of yes/no questions. The design of the study is based on the fact that a syntactically well-formed yes/no question in Turkish may take a number of different forms, depending on the placement of the question particle mI. Nevertheless, there are positions in which mI cannot appear, and learners need to acquire these syntactic constraints. Furthermore, different placements of mI in a sentence correspond to different semantic interpretations of the question: while some allow for a wide scope interpretation, others yield only the narrow scope reading. Gračanin-Yuksek and Kırkıcı suggest that L2 learners can be said to have acquired the semantics of yes/no questions only if they can correctly match the syntactic representation of a particular yes/no question with a correct interpretation or interpretations. Additionally, appropriate usage of yes/ no questions is governed by pragmatic principles. Pragmatic competence involves knowing how to use the structure in a felicitous discourse. Eighty-nine participants (34 native speakers of Turkish and 55 L2 Turkish learners with various L1 backgrounds with elementary, intermediate, upper-intermediate L2 proficiency) were tested via three paper-and-pencil tasks involving grammaticality, semantic similarity rating and felicitousness judgment. L2 proficiency-dependent improvement occurred in the performance of all participants, but L2 learners’ pragmatic competence seemed to lag behind their syntactic and semantic competence. 4.3

The acquisition of L2 discourse/pragmatics

This section includes two papers on the acquisition of speech acts. In Chapter 7, Bayyurt and Martı investigate the use of suggestion formulas in L2 Turkish by L1 English speakers. The data comes from an assigned essay (in the form of a letter to a friend) and a discourse completion task (DCT) using 10 different contexts. Participants were advanced L2 learners (n = 15) and native Turkish speakers (n = 30). L2 learners differed from native speakers in their formulation of suggestions in both tasks. In terms of the use of suggestion strategies, L2 Turkish learners, despite their high level of proficiency, were found to be less sensitive to social context than native speakers of Turkish, and they tended to use imperatives to make suggestions. However, direct suggestion-giving in the form of imperatives is not

Introduction 11

a strategy commonly employed by native speakers of Turkish. Such direct strategies may not be due to English influence. Thus, the frequent use of such forms by L1 English-L2 Turkish learners may imply that L2 Turkish learners fail to assess the degree of face-threat that this type of suggestion-giving poses in Turkish. Imperative forms in Turkish are bare forms, i.e. without any inflection. The indirect strategies native Turkish speakers commonly prefer, however, involve modals and conditionals, which are morphologically complex forms. Bayyurt and Martı suggest that this may also help explain why L2 learners prefer imperatives to other forms in making suggestions in Turkish. In Chapter 8, Hatipoğlu explores L1-based differences in the use of L2 Turkish apology patterns by L1-Arabic (n = 22) and L1-Russian learners (n = 11) with intermediate- and advanced-level L2 proficiency. As a point of reference, data from 414 native speakers of Turkish was collected. The data source was a DCT involving 20 different contexts where speakers committed different types of offences (e.g. damaging victim’s possession). Each context featured an encounter between interlocutors of either equal or different status. The analysis covers the main categories of apology strategies: (A – Explicit expressions of apology; B – Explanations or account; C – Acknowledgement of responsibility; D – Positive politeness apologies; E – An offer of repair/redress, F – Promise of forbearance; N – Non-apology) but the focus is on three categories of explicit expressions of apology and their sub-strategies such as A1 – An offer of apology: Özür dilerim (I apologize); A2 – An expression of regret: Üzgünüm (I am sorry); A3 – Request for forgiveness: Affedersiniz/Kusura bakmayın (Excuse me), Beni affedin/ Bağışlayın (Forgive me), Pardon (Pardon me). The results show that Strategy A, which appeared to be the basic apology mechanism for all groups, was used more frequently by L2 learners than native speakers. As for the sub-­strategies, for the native Turkish and L1 Arabic groups, A1 and A3 were the most frequently employed strategies, whereas for L1-Russian speakers, A1-özür dilerim was the predominant form. A2 and A3 strategies were rare in the L1-Russian group. Furthermore, the L2 learners were not completely native-like in terms of the intensifier/modifier forms selected and the extent of their use. Hatipoğlu accounts for the differences on the basis of the distance between the L1 and the L2 with respect to the cultural and pragmatic norms. 4.4 The processing of L2 morpho-syntax The first two studies in this section explore real-time processing of morpho-syntactic issues in Turkish. Uygun and Gürel’s study in Chapter 9 involves an unprimed lexical decision experiment with two groups of L2 Turkish learners (i.e. L1-­English, 17 intermediate, 14 advanced; L1-Russian, 14 intermediate, 17

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advanced) aiming to determine whether morphological characteristics of the L1 influence the way nominal inflection (locative case, ablative case and plural) is processed in the L2. The control group included 32 native speakers of Turkish. It was predicted that since Russian has a more complex inflectional system than English, this might lead to more reliance on morphological parsing in L1-­ Russian participants. L1-English participants, on the other hand, were expected to do decomposition to a lesser extent. It was further predicted that, although the L1 morphological system/processing pattern may initially influence the processing of complex forms in the L2, with increasing proficiency, L2 learners could demonstrate more native-like processing patterns, irrespective of the morphological structure of their L1 and its processing pattern. The results revealed no decomposition for native speakers of Turkish, as complex words (one-suffix and two-suffix words) were accessed as fast as monomorphemic words. Similar results were also found in the L1-English group with advanced proficiency in Turkish. However, the high proficiency L1-Russian group showed a tendency for decomposition. A similar difference was observed between the two intermediate groups. The results suggest that native-like processing is possible in late L2 acquisition. Findings also reveal L2 proficiency-based differences in the extent of L1 transfer in processing L2 inflection. Nevertheless, within the scope of this study, it is not completely clear whether native-like full-listing patterns in the L1-English group can confidently be linked to complete success in L2 processing or to transfer from limited-inflection L1 English. Chapter 10 is by Aydın, Aygüneş, and Demiralp, who investigated, via event-­ related potentials (ERPs), native/non-native differences in the processing of subject case and subject-verb agreement by focusing on factors such as L2 proficiency and language distance. Fourteen native speakers of Turkish and 28 L2 learners with low- and high-intermediate levels of proficiency were given an online grammaticality judgment task. The L2 participants in this study were from various L1-backgrounds: Albanian, Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Portuguese, and Russian. These languages are similar to Turkish in terms of having subject-­ verb agreement in finite clauses, but they diverge with respect to subject case: Turkish has nominative/genitive alternation, while the L1s of the participants have nominative subjects only. The prediction was to find native-like processing in the convergence condition (i.e. subject-verb agreement) but not in the divergent condition (i.e. subject case). In line with this prediction, native and non-native speakers displayed a very similar ERP pattern in processing agreement violations in finite clauses. Both groups showed an N400 effect, although this effect was reduced in non-native speakers. Thus, the processing of subject-verb agreement revealed no qualitative native-nonnative differences. As for case violation, in finite clauses, an N400 effect was observed only in native speakers. The non-native speakers of

Introduction 13

Turkish showed a delayed P600 effect. In non-finite clauses, a left inferior frontal negativity was detected in native speakers, whereas a positivity (P600) was observed in non-native speakers in all time windows. This suggests that L2 learners of Turkish differ from native speakers in terms of the ERP components elicited in (non)finite clauses in the divergent condition. In Chapter 11, Mercan explores the role of structural priming as an implicit facilitation mechanism in the processing of possessive NPs and noun clauses with nominalized verbs. The experiment involved 20 adult L2 Turkish learners, most of whom had English or Norwegian as their L1. Their L2 proficiency levels ranged from B1 to C1–C2 on the Common European Framework of Reference. The possessive NPs (e.g. prenses-in [princess-GEN] öykü-sü [story-POSS.3SG]: ‘the princess’s story’) and noun clauses with nominalized verbs as the predicate (e.g. prenses-in [princess-GEN] gül-düğ-ü [laugh-VN-POSS.3SG]: ‘that the princess laughed/was laughing’) share the same external genitive-possessive morpho-­ syntax in Turkish. The test items came mainly from Mercan’s previous L1 Turkish study on structural priming (Bahadır 2012). The aim was to establish whether adult L2 Turkish learners represent nouns in possessive NPs and nominalized verbs inside noun clauses as distinct constructions or as one single GEN-POSS structure. Hence, the study investigated whether the comprehension of a noun as opposed to a nominalized verb in a prime sentence increases the tendency to produce the same kind of GEN-POSS construction (rather than the alternative) in a subsequent target fragment. While facilitation/priming would indicate distinct representations of possessive NPs and noun clauses, an absence of priming would suggest a single GEN-POSS representation for these constructions. A task in which L2 learners first read a prime sentence and then completed a target fragment indicated that participants produced more possessive NPs after reading NP primes, and more noun clauses following noun clause primes. The findings thus confirmed the role of structural priming in L2 processing. A concluding chapter presents issues emerging from a synthesis of overall findings reported in the volume, and a brief note on pedagogical issues.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank all the contributors for their hard work and cooperation during the preparation of this book. I would also like to acknowledge the constant support and encouragement of the LALD series editors, Lydia White and Roumyana Slabakova as well as Kees Vaes at John Benjamins. This project would not have been realized without the contributions of the reviewers (listed in alphabetical order), to whom I am grateful for commenting on the original submissions: Semahat Işıl Açıkalın, Didar Akar, Ayhan Aksu Koç, Gülşat Aygen, Anna Baczkowska, Walcir Cardosa, İclal Ergenç, Alice Foucart, Aslı Göksel, Güliz Güneş, Selçuk

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İşsever, Barış Kabak, Yuhko Kayama, Ceyda Arslan Kechriotis, Meltem Kelepir, Matti Laine, Donna Lardiere, Eden Sum-Hung Li, Heather Marsden, Hasan Mesut Meral, Balkız Öztürk, Derrin Pinto, Markus Pochtrager, Jeong Ah Shin, Jeffrey Steele, Hatice Sofu, Ümit Deniz Turan, Mari Umeda, Kutlay Yağmur. I would also like to thank my colleague Yasemin Bayyurt for her encouragement and help in the initial planning of this volume. Last but not least, I would like to thank Peggy Alptekin for her meticulous editing of certain chapters of this book. This book project has benefited from funding from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK 1001–project no: 112K183).

References Akar, D. 1990. Wh-questions in Turkish. MA thesis, Boğaziçi University. Arslan, Z. C. 1999. Approaches to wh-Structures in Turkish. MA thesis, Boğaziçi University. Bahadır, G. 2012. Structural Priming in Turkish Genitive-PossessiveConstructions. PhD dissertation, Middle East Technical University. Bayraktaroğlu, A. 2001. Advice-giving in Turkish: “Superiority” or “solidarity”? In Linguistic Politeness: A Case of Greek and Turkish [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 88], A. Bayraktaroğlu & M. Sifianou (eds), 177–208. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  doi:  10.1075/pbns.88.08bay

Bayyurt, Y. & Martı, L. 2012. The use of suggestion formulas by nonnative speakers of English in an EFL context. In Teaching English as a Foreign Language: Proposals for the Language Classroom, M. D. Garcia-Pastor (ed.), 157–181. Catarroja, Valencia: Perifèric Edicions. Durgunoğlu, A. Y. & Öney, B. (1999). A cross-linguistic comparison of phonological awareness and word recognition. Reading and Writing: An interdisciplinary Journal 11: 281–299.  doi:  10.1023/A:1008093232622

Enç, M. 1991. The semantics of specificity. Linguistic Inquiry 22: 1–25. Erguvanlı-Taylan, E. 1984. The Function of Word Order in Turkish Grammar. Berkeley CA: University of California Press. Erguvanlı-Taylan, E. (ed.) 2002. The Verb in Turkish [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 44]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/la.44 Göksel, A. & Kerslake, C. 2005. Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.  doi:  10.4324/9780203340769

Gürel, A. 2002. Linguistic Characteristics of Second Language Acquisition and First Language Attrition: Turkish Overt versus Null Pronouns. PhD dissertation, McGill University. Kabak, B. 2011. Turkish vowel harmony. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, M. van Oostendorp, C. Ewen, E. Hume & K. Rice (eds), 2831–2854. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Ketrez, N. F. 2012. A Student Grammar of Turkish. Cambridge: CUP.  doi:  10.1017/CBO9780511667077

Kornfilt, J. 1997. Turkish. Descriptive Grammars Series. London: Routledge. Kornfilt, J. 2009. Turkish and the Turkic languages. In The World’s Major Languages, 2nd edn, B. Comrie (ed.), 619–644. Oxford: OUP. Kural, M. 1992. Properties of scrambling in Turkish. Ms, UCLA. Lardiere, D. 2009. Some thoughts on a contrastive analysis of features in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 25: 173–227. doi: 10.1177/0267658308100283 Lewis, G. L. 1967. Turkish Grammar. Oxford: OUP.

Introduction 15

Özsoy, A. S. 1996. A’-dependencies in Turkish. In Current issues in Turkish linguistics: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, B. Rona (ed.), 139–158. Ankara: Hitit Yayınevi. Özsoy, S. 2001. Türkçe/Turkish. B.Ü. Dil Merkezi Yabancı Dil Olarak Türkçe Dizisi, 3rd edn. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınları. Özsoy, S. 2004. Türkçe’nin Yapısı-I Sesbilimi (The Structure of Turkish-Phonology). B.Ü. Dil Merkezi Türkçe’nin Yapısı Dizisi. Istanbul: Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Yayınları. Slabakova, R. 2013. Discourse and pragmatics. In The Cambridge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, J. Herschensohn & M. Young-Scholten (eds), 482–504. Cambridge: CUP.  doi:  10.1017/CBO9781139051729.029

Yavuz, H. & Balcı, A. 2011. Turkish Phonology and Morphology. Eskişehir: Anadolu University Publication. Turkish Statistical Institute. 2014. Underhill, R. 1976. Turkish Grammar. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

PART I

The acquisition of L2 phonology

Chapter 1

Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody The effects of purely phonological and phonosyntactic issues* Öner Özçelik

Indiana University

This paper investigates second language acquisition of lower-level (i.e. word-­level) and higher-level prosody in Turkish to address the role of Universal Grammar (UG) via two different studies. The results of the first study demonstrate that lower-level prosody presents particular challenges for English-­speaking learners, as the task for them involves expunging a prosodic constituent from the grammar, which is hypothesized to be impossible. Higher-­ level prosody, on the other hand, was found to be relatively easy to acquire, despite not being taught in Turkish language classes in a comprehensive and linguistically correct manner. Although learners were not native-like in their performance on lower-level prosody, their representations were UG-constrained. Thus, it is concluded that learners have access to UG for prosody at both levels. Keywords: Turkish, L2 phonology, prosody, stress, Universal Grammar

1. Introduction Prosody is one of the most challenging areas of second language (L2) phonological acquisition, as problems persist even for learners at advanced levels (e.g. Archibald 1998; Goad & White 2006, 2008; Trofimovich & Baker 2006). This * The first half of this chapter (i.e. Section 2) is based partially on experiments originally reported in my unpublished McGill University dissertation, and I would like to express my deepest thanks to Heather Goad, Lydia White, Glyne Piggott and Michael Wagner for their helpful comments on an earlier version of the ideas presented therein. Section 2 has also benefited from the comments of the audience at GASLA 12 at the University of Florida, GALA 2013 at the University of Oldenburg and SLRF 32 at Brigham Young University. The second half of the paper (Section 3) has benefited from the comments of the audience at GALANA 4 at the University of Toronto and TCP 2010 in Tokyo. doi 10.1075/lald.59.02ozc © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

20 Öner Özçelik

paper investigates the acquisition of two different levels of prosody in L2 Turkish with two different experiments: (i) lower-level (i.e. word-level) prosody, which involves phonological representations alone, and (ii) higher-level (e.g. phraseand sentence-level) prosody, which requires knowledge of both phonology and syntax. It is concluded that the acquisition of Turkish word-level prosody is particularly challenging, especially for speakers of languages like English, which uses foot structure. For these learners, acquiring Turkish, a footless language (Özçelik 2013, 2014), requires ridding the grammar of a prosodic constituent (i.e. the Foot), a task that is hypothesized to be extremely difficult on the current proposal. It is also concluded, in the latter half of the paper, that Turkish sentence-­ level prosody, unlike word-level prosody, is easy to acquire for the same learner population, for this simply requires parameter resetting, and crucially, does not involve expunging any prosodic constituent from the grammar. This is despite the fact that this is a task that lies at the interface of phonology and syntax, and is, thus, expected to be difficult under certain approaches to L2 acquisition, such as the Interface Hypothesis (e.g. Tsimpli & Sorace 2006). Furthermore, as will be discussed later, the dichotomy observed in the results is despite the fact that the participants had been taught a pedagogically reasonable but linguistically incorrect (and impossible) rule for Turkish sentential stress, which should arguably have made higher-level prosody even more difficult to acquire. The findings provide strong evidence for Universal Grammar (UG)-based theories of L2 acquisition (e.g. White 1989b, 2003), not only for the second study, where convergence occurred on target-like constructions, but also on the first study, where learners diverged from native speakers. More specifically, the interlanguage grammars of the English-speaking participants at each stage of the learning path are possible grammars constrained by UG, although they are neither like the L1 nor the L2. Furthermore, despite being pedagogically and cognitively reasonable, certain stages/interlanguage grammars did not emerge in the productions of the English-speaking learners as these are not permitted by the inventory of feet provided by UG. For example, no learners went through a stage where their interlanguage grammar permitted weight-insensitive iambs such as (HĹ) and (HH ´), as weight-insensitive iambs are not allowed by UG (e.g. Hayes 1995; McCarthy & Prince 1986). The remainder of this paper is organized in the following way: Section 2 is concerned with the acquisition of Turkish word-level prosody (Study 1), analyzing the productions of English- and French-speaking learners through a controlled production experiment. The section illustrates the paths these learners go through in acquiring L2 Turkish word stress. Section 3 details the study of higher-­ level prosody (Study 2), concentrating on English-speaking learners of Turkish through several elicited production tasks. Both studies provide significant insight



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

into the role of UG in L2 acquisition. Section 4 concludes the paper with a discussion on the pedagogical implications of the study for L2 teaching of Turkish prosody. 2. Acquisition of Turkish word-level prosody Previous research on L2 acquisition of stress has focused almost entirely on the acquisition of English (e.g. Archibald 1992, 1993; Pater 1997; Tremblay 2007). L2 acquisition of word-level stress/prominence in languages such as Turkish (and French), which have fixed word-final (or phrase-final) prominence, has almost never been investigated. This was caused in part by the belief that acquiring these languages should be easy, involving few errors, if any. That is, on the face of it, it looks as if such a learning scenario would not provide much insight into the abstract linguistic generalizations made by L2 learners. I demonstrate that the task of acquisition of such a language is by no means simple. Rather, I argue that the task of L2 acquisition of the prosodic system is much more difficult for learners with a footed first language (L1) (e.g. English) acquiring a L2 which lacks foot structure (as with Turkish, see e.g. Özçelik 2011, 2013, 2014) than for learners with a footless L1 acquiring a footed L2. More specifically, I propose that once a prosodic constituent, such as the Foot, emerges in a L1, it is impossible to rid the grammar of this constituent in learning an L2 that lacks the relevant constituent. L2 learners with a footed L1 will thus not be able to expunge the Foot from their grammar while learning a footless L2. They will, instead, be restricted to resetting parameters that act on the Foot (e.g. trochaic/iambic, iterative/non-iterative, weight-sensitive/weight-insensitive). The focus of the first study discussed in this section is the L2 acquisition of Turkish word-level stress by English- and French-speaking learners. As mentioned above, I assume that the prosodic grammar of Turkish does not assign foot structure, although, under some well-defined cases, certain syllables are footed since they come into the computation already footed in the lexicon (Özçelik 2013, 2014). These involve the so-called exceptional stress driving suffixes (e.g. Inkelas & Orgun 1998, 2003; Kabak & Vogel 2001; Özçelik 2014), which, I assume, are pre-specified with foot edges in the input/underlying representations (Özçelik 2014). In accordance with the previous literature, English, I assume, is different from Turkish in that it requires all words to be footed, except for functional words (e.g. Hayes 1995). French, on the other hand, is completely footless; that is, all French words are footless. Feet are assigned neither regularly by the grammar (as in Turkish), nor exceptionally in the input (e.g. Beckman 1986; Jun & Fougeron 2000; Ladd 1996). Given these differences between the three languages,

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and assuming that the initial state of L2 acquisition is that of the L1 settings of all parameters, as suggested by the Full Transfer Full Access (FTFA) Hypothesis (e.g. Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996; White 1989b), different predictions arise for English- vs. French-speaking learners of L2 Turkish. In particular, the initial state of L2 acquisition will be ‘footless’ for French-speaking learners, whereas it will be footed for English-speaking learners. This will have important effects on the degree to which these two learner populations will have difficulties acquiring a (variably) footless language like Turkish. The results of the experiments, particularly those of the L1-English-speaking learners, have significant implications for the status of UG in L2 acquisition. Before delving more into these issues, the following section details how word-­ level stress or prominence is represented in the three languages under consideration here. 2.1

Word ‘stress’ in Turkish, French and English

Regular ‘stress’ in Turkish falls on the last syllable of prosodic words (PWds), and it is footless. As indicated in (1), each time a suffix is added to a word, stress, or rather prominence, falls on the last syllable of the word: (1) a. eşék b. eşek-lér donkey donkey-Pl “donkey” “donkeys” c. eşek-ler-ín d. eşek-ler-in-dé donkey-Pl-your donkey-Pl-your-Loc “your donkeys” “on your donkeys”

Turkish also has some exceptional suffixes that are either pre-stressing or, if bisyllabic, stressed on their first syllable. The example (2b) illustrates a pre-stressing suffix, i.e. the question particle, -mI (underlined): (2) a. eşék b. eşék-mi? donkey donkey-Question “(it is) a donkey” “Is it a donkey?”

Özçelik (2013, 2014) assumes that regular word-final accent in Turkish is footless (as with words in (1) or (2a)). Since the grammar of the language does not have any means of parsing syllables into feet, intonational prominence (instead of foot-based ‘stress’) falls, by default, on the final syllable of PWds. As opposed to (1) and (2a), in (2b), there is a suffix with an underlying foot (i.e. /(mI)Ft/). Given this foot, and given the trochaic and binary nature of the grammar, when



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

-mi is attached to a word, it appears as pre-stressing (i.e. [(eşék-mi)Ft]), since it is located at the right edge of a binary foot (even though the grammar cannot assign feet). Thus, regular final prominence and the exceptional stress are accounted for in a unified manner. The grammar on this account is trochaic and the trochees are binary, but the same grammar is unable to parse syllables into feet, and in the absence of underlying feet, final syllables of words bear (footless) intonational prominence (instead of stress). As Özçelik (2013, 2014) indicates, this proposal receives additional evidence from the acoustic correlates of prominence/stress in Turkish. For example, both intensity and a sharp F0 rise are correlates of exceptional stress (which is a pattern typical of trochaic languages), whereas regular final prominence is only correlated by an optional slight rise in F0 (e.g. Konrot 1981, 1987). As such, given the lack of greater intensity or duration on the prominent syllable and the optionality of pitch rise (as well as its weakness), ‘regular stress’ in Turkish seems more like intonational (footless) prominence than (footbased) stress (see Beckman 1986; Hualde, Elordieta, Gamind & Smiljanic 2002; Ladd 1996 for more on what correlates are needed for prominence to be categorized as ‘stress’). Further evidence for the trochaic and binary nature of the grammar itself comes from the fact that monosyllabic exceptional suffixes in Turkish are always pre-stressing (never stressed or post-stressing), whereas ‘stressed’ exceptional suffixes are always bisyllabic, and it is always the first syllable that bears stress, with no instances where the second syllable is stressed (Inkelas & Orgun 1998; Özçelik 2013, 2014). With respect to French, it is footless like Turkish, and there has been ample evidence provided in the literature for the footless status of French (see Özçelik to appear; see also Féry 2001; Jun & Fougeron 2000; Ladd 1996 for relevant work). For example, the domain of obligatory prominence in French is not PWd as in foot-­based languages, but rather the Phonological Phrase (PPh). In a PPh consisting of several PWds, nonfinal PWds can, thus, surface without any stress or even prominence (Jun & Fougeron 2000; Post 2003). This suggests that, at least for non-­final PWds, stress or foot structure cannot be postulated for French: (3) [lə [mɔvɛ]PWd [gærsɔ̃́]PWd ]PPh le mauvais garçon ‘the bad boy’ 

(adapted from Goad & Prévost 2011)

Regarding English, the third language that is relevant in the current study, following previous research (e.g. Halle & Vergnaud 1987; Hayes 1981, 1995; Liberman & Prince 1977), I assume that every lexical word obligatorily contains at least one foot, and as such, English differs significantly from Turkish and French. It is commonly agreed that English constructs syllables into binary trochaic feet starting from the right edge of a PWd. One piece of evidence for this, among others,

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comes from the fact that every word in English has at least one stressed syllable (except for function words), and that there are no lexical words in the language that are smaller in size than a binary foot: syllables that are one-syllable long thus contain a long vowel in English (unlike, for example, the Turkish word su ‘water’). Furthermore, correlates of stressed syllables in English do not only include higher F0 (pitch), but also greater intensity and duration (Beckman 1986; Fry 1955; Lieberman 1960). Since the status of English as a foot-requiring language is clear, in the remaining parts of this section, I will focus on summarizing the way English constructs syllables into feet and the parameter settings it employs in doing so. This will also help us better understand the results of the study later, especially the individual results (Section 2.4.2), which indicate intricate relationships between different parameter settings. The example (4) illustrates, on a step-by-step basis, how English constructs syllables into feet, with the relevant parameter settings, which will later be crucial in demonstrating how English-speaking learners of Turkish restructure their grammar through parameter resetting. I take the word originality as an example here. As seen in (4a), Extrametricality, in English, is set to Yes, meaning that all final syllables are invisible as far as stress assignment is concerned. (4b) shows that foot construction starts at the right edge (skipping the final extrametrical syllable). As shown in (4c), feet are binary in English. That is, there must be two syllables (or moras) within a foot. (4d) illustrates that feet are left-headed (i.e. trochaic) in English, as the leftmost syllable within the foot is the more prominent one (i.e. the head). Finally, (4e) demonstrates that on condition that the word is long enough, multiple feet can be created. In other words, that footing in English is iterative: (4) a. Extrametricality: Yes vs. No σ σ σ σ σ o.rì.gi.ná.li.ty

b. Directionality: Left-to-Right vs. Right-to-Left Ft σ σ σ σ σ o.rì.gi.ná.li.ty

c. Foot Binarity: Yes vs. No Ft

σ σ σ σ σ o.rì.gi.ná.li.ty



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

d. Headedness: Left vs. Right Ft σ σ σ σ σ o.rì.gi.ná.li.ty

e. Iterativity: Yes vs. No Ft



Ft

σ σ σ σ σ o.rì.gi.ná.li.ty

Finally, note that when there are multiple syllables that bear stress in a given word, it is the rightmost stressed syllable that functions as primary stress. This means that End-Rule is set to Right in English, instead of Left, which is yet another parameter setting in English. 2.2

L2 acquisition of word stress/prominence

Assuming that UG allows for both footed and footless languages, and that one of these two language types involves projection of a prosodic constituent that the other does not have, the L1 learner is faced with a learnability problem in determining whether the target language is footed or not. If a child learning a footless language as an L1 erroneously assumes that the input he or she receives suggests a language with the Foot, a previously created structure (i.e. the Foot) will need to be undone by the child to retreat to the footless value. However, given a deterministic parser (Berwick 1985; Dresher & Kaye 1990; Marcus 1980), in other words, the type of parser that is commonly believed to be available to children in generative approaches to language acquisition, undoing structures is not possible. One way of avoiding this problem is based on the child’s ordering his or her hypotheses. For example, if the assumption that the target language is footless was the child’s first (default) hypothesis, and if the Foot constituent was projected only on the basis of positive evidence, it would emerge only in the grammars of children learning languages with foot structure. Previous research investigating the acquisition of English and Dutch, languages that require every word to be footed, seems to point to this direction. Children learning these languages initially hypothesize that these languages are footless, despite the fact that they are in fact footed (e.g. Fikkert 1994; Demuth 1995; Goad 1997; Goad to appear; cf. Goad & Prévost 2011). This provides evidence that the Foot constituent is projected later, after the child has encountered footed words in the input.

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Turning to L2 acquisition, I hypothesize that, as with L1 acquisition, once the Foot has been projected in an L1, it is impossible to expunge it from the grammar in learning a footless L2. Furthermore, since, for L2 learners, the acquisition process starts with the L1 settings of all parameters, and, crucially, not with the ‘default’ values provided by UG (e.g. Schwartz & Sprouse 1996; White 1989a, 1989b), unlike children learning their L1s, L2 learners will not be able to order their hypotheses. Accordingly, I predict that if the Foot is part of the L1 grammar, it will also necessarily be a part of interlanguage grammars. In other words, the prediction here is that it is impossible for a learner to move from an L1 that requires feet to an L2 that is footless. The opposite direction (i.e. when the L1 has the default footless value, and the task is, thus, to add the Foot), should be possible, although the current study only tests the former scenario. 2.3

Study 1

In order to investigate these predictions, a semi-controlled production experiment was conducted with English-speaking (n = 13) and French-speaking (n = 6) learners of L2 Turkish, of various proficiency levels. Participants’ proficiency was determined via two independent proficiency tests: a cloze test was employed to evaluate their syntactic, morphological, semantic, and discourse proficiency, and a read-aloud task was used to evaluate their global phonological proficiency. The reason for adding the read-aloud task was to know more about participants’ phonological proficiency, as the former measure of proficiency would not tell us anything about this. Similar read-aloud tasks have been employed in previous research. The one used here was similar to the one by Akita (2006, 2007). Due to the limited number of potential participants available, the proficiency level was not a factor in recruiting participants; the experiment was open to any learner of Turkish. Given the results of the two proficiency tests, however, there were 2 beginner, 8 low intermediate, and 3 advanced L1-English-speaking learners of Turkish; and 1 beginner, 3 low intermediate, and 2 advanced L1-French-speaking learners. Different proficiency levels, especially in the case of the English-speaking learners, allowed testing predictions about a developmental path. L2 participants in both groups ranged in age from 20 to 40 years old (with most participants around ages 25 to 30). They started learning Turkish mostly in college or afterwards, most commonly between the ages of 20 to 30. With the exception of 5 English-speaking and 1 French-speaking participant, all had spent some time in Turkey, and all had some kind of naturalistic Turkish input, most commonly through Turkish-speaking partners or friends. All of the participants had college education (or higher) or were, at the time of testing, attending college.



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

Table 1.  Stimuli Bisyllabic words: LL

LH

HL

HH

kedi cat

çatal fork

elma apple

bardak glass/cup

Trisyllabic words: LLL

LLH

LHL

LHH

HLL

HLH

HHL

HHH

araba car

tebeşir chalk

yumurta egg

örümcek spider

şemsiye umbrella

portakal orange

dondurma defterler ice-cream notebooks

All of them were near-monolingual, and all were recruited in Canada; so they were speakers of Canadian English and French. In the production task, the stimuli consisted of 70 words of various lengths and syllable structure profiles. All of these were nouns. Furthermore, all possible Heavy (H) and Light (L) syllable combinations were represented for all bisyllabic and trisyllabic stimuli, resulting in four bisyllabic and eight trisyllabic conditions.1 There were 5 words within each condition, which resulted in 20 bisyllabic and 40 trisyllabic stimuli in total.2 Examples of stimuli under each condition are given in Table 1. In order to prevent syllabification strategies from affecting the results as confounds, in preparing the stimuli, it was ensured that all coda + onset sequences were either sonorant + obstruent, sonorant + sonorant, or obstruent + obstruent. Whereas sonorants were limited to liquids and nasals, obstruents were comprised of stops, fricatives, and affricates. Coda + onset sequences that are composed of an obstruent + sonorant were not included. Although these are permitted as coda + onset sequences in Turkish, a language that has no complex onsets, they are syllabified as complex onsets in English and French. For this reason, it was predicted that their inclusion would lead the learners to transfer L1 syllabification strategies to the L2, which may then confound the results.

1. “Heavy” vs. “Light” here is from the perspective of the English grammar. As no syllable is heavy in Turkish, neither vowel length nor the presence of a coda consonant has an effect on the location of stress or prominence in Turkish. Of course, the assumption made here that Turkish is footless also suggests that there are no heavy syllables as far as prominence is concerned. 2. There were also 5 four-syllable and 5 five-syllable words, but these were not controlled in terms of weight profiles, as it was not possible to find sufficient number of words of each type.

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Learners were shown pictures of each stimulus. They had to first utter them in isolation, and then say them again in a carrier sentence (see (5)). Only the stimuli in carrier sentences were transcribed and analyzed for acoustic measures. (5) Bu resim-de X var. This picture-Loc X exist(ent) “There is X in this picture.”

Words in isolation were not analyzed, as there would be potential confounding variables such as utterance-final lengthening, which tends to happen across languages when an utterance is pronounced in isolation. In addition, stress patterns of words produced in isolation are confounded by phrase-level accent (Gordon 2014; Hyman 2014). The words produced by the participants (those in carrier sentences) were transcribed and annotated for stress placement using the acoustic analysis software Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2011). In determining the presence and location of stressed syllables in experimental words, the following acoustic correlates were measured: vowel and syllable duration (in ms), average and peak intensity (in dB), average fundamental frequency (F0, in Hz), and time of F0 peak. For segmentation, both spectrogram and waveform cues were employed, as suggested by Peterson and Lehiste (1960). The participants were tested in a sound-attenuated booth, and testing was done individually. The participants were audio-recorded using Audacity (http:// audacity.sourceforge.net) onto a MacBook Pro laptop, with the help of an external Logitech microphone. The microphone was placed approximately 20 cm from the speakers’ lips. The tasks were administered in the following order: a background questionnaire, production experiment, and two proficiency tests (the cloze test and the read-aloud task). The whole procedure took about 1 hour per participant. 2.4

Results and discussion

2.4.1 General results The results of the experiment largely confirm our predictions. None of the English-speaking participants were able to rid their grammar of the prosodic Foot constituent. In other words, greater duration and/or intensity − the correlates of foot-based stress − accompanied word-level prominence in their productions. As was predicted, however, they were able to make various UG-constrained changes to their grammar, such as resetting Extrametricality from Yes to No, and at later stages, Foot-Type from Trochaic to Iambic, thereby having increasingly more word types with word-final stress (more discussion on this under ‘Individual Results’). Still, as the general results indicate, beginner-level learners were able to



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

place stress on the final syllable in Turkish words, only about 10% and 13.66% of the time for the bisyllabic and trisyllabic stimuli, respectively. For intermediate learners, these percentages rose up to 55.89% and 48.63% for bisyllabic and trisyllabic stimuli, respectively. For advanced learners, the rates were 65% and 51.82%. This suggests that L1-English-speaking learners, even at advanced levels, often failed to place stress on the final syllables in L2 Turkish words (even when final foot-based stress is considered). Furthermore, as indicated by a one-way ANOVA, the differences between the three groups were not statistically significant, F = (2, 3) = 0.3488, p = 0.7308 for bisyllabic words; and F = (2, 3) = 0.2255, p = 0.8105 for trisyllabic words. French-speaking learners, however, produced target-like footless outputs, with word-final prominence irrespective of their L2 proficiency. Final prominence in their utterances was accompanied neither by greater duration (word-­ level) nor intensity, nor, surprisingly, by a pitch rise (slight or sharp). However, for this group, the shape of the pitch contour was different on final syllables than on non-final ones.3 In particular, these learners were able to place greater prominence on the final syllables of Turkish PWds about 80% to 90% of the time (as evaluated by a native Turkish speaker and double-checked by another one), regardless of their level of proficiency. The French group was significantly different from the English group, as confirmed by the results of a one-way ANOVA, F  =  (1,  17) = 5.4338, p < 0.05 for bisyllabic; F = (1, 17) = 6.8018, p < 0.05 for trisyllabic words. Furthermore, as the results of our acoustic measurements indicate, unlike English-speaking learners, only about 9.09% of French-speaking learners’ final syllables had greater duration than nonfinal syllables. This indicates that when they produced final prominence, this was footless intonational prominence, as with Turkish, rather than foot-based stress like the one employed by the English-speaking learners. The general results are informative as they reveal significant differences between English-speaking and French-speaking learners of Turkish in being able to place more prominence (whether it is stress or footless prominence) on final syllables of Turkish words. However, these results cannot tell us anything about individual grammars or parameter settings. In order to obtain a clear view of parameter setting (and resetting), one must investigate individual learner grammars, which is what the following section purports to do for the English-speaking participants, who, unlike the French-­ 3. The fact that not only intensity and duration, but also any statistically significant pitch rise was lacking in the prominent syllables produced by French-speaking learners can be linked to the possibility that sentence-medial nuclei do not exhibit F0 rise at all in Turkish (see İpek 2011; İpek & Zubizarreta 2014; Kamali 2011). On this assumption, they were doing what native Turkish speakers do.

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speaking participants, had to go through a number of stages in reconstructing their grammars. 2.4.2 Individual results: The path This section presents individual results for the English-speaking participants, the group whose grammars differed most from the target language. These learners had differences in interlanguage grammars. These interlanguage grammars can all be represented on a path, a path which corresponds roughly to their proficiency levels. Examples (6) through (10) illustrate this path. Note that due to space limitations, the results are represented by 3 different words with 3 different weight profiles: yu.mur.ta ‘egg’ (LHL), por.ta.kal ‘orange’ (HLH) and a.ra.ba ‘car’ (LLL). Notice that the change in stress patterns of each word at each successive stage of acquisition is highly informative of the parameter settings learners employ at each stage of acquisition. At the first stage (i.e. Stage 0), there were learners who used the L1 settings of all parameters. As demonstrated in (6), these learners stressed the target Turkish words the way L1 English would stress them if they were English words. In other words, they were uttering Turkish words with English grammar, i.e. building binary, weight-sensitive, iterative trochees starting from the right edge of PWds, with Extrametricality set to Yes and End-Rule set to Right. The two learners who appeared to be in this stage were indeed beginners in terms of their general proficiency: (6) Stage 0: Use English grammar/parameter settings Ft Ft Ft σ σ yu.múr.ta

σ σ pór.ta.kal

σ σ á.ra.ba

Extram: Yes Head: Left Weight-Sens: Yes End-R: Right Direc: R → L Ft-Bin: Yes Iterativity: Yes → 2 learners (both beginners)

Notice that as final syllables are extrameterical, they are never stressed at this stage (although there were a couple of exceptions). A binary moraic trochee is constructed from the right edge (excluding the final syllable), meaning that stress is assigned to the penult if it is heavy (e.g. yumúrta), otherwise to the antepenult (e.g. pórtakal and áraba). Heavy syllables can form a foot by themselves, as they are binary at the moraic level, as with [(pór).ta.] and [yu.(múr).ta]. At the next stage, there were learners who reset Extrametricality from Yes to No, as demonstrated in (7).



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

(7) Stage 1: Reset Extrametricality from Yes to No Ft Ft Ft Ft σ σ σ yu.múr.ta

σ σ σ pòr.ta.kál

σ σ σ a.rá.ba

Extram: No Head: Left Weight-Sens: Yes End-R: Right Direc: R → L Ft-Bin: Yes Iterativity: Yes → 5 learners (4 low intermediate, 1 advanced)

With this single change in their grammar, which came along by means of resetting a single parameter (i.e. Extrametricality), these learners were able to have final stress in words ending in closed syllables, such as portakál. This is because a final closed/heavy syllable can form its own foot, since the grammar is still Weight-Sensitive. As such, a final heavy syllable could be stressed even though the grammar is trochaic, as the only syllable available is the leftmost (as well as rightmost) within this foot. In sum, this single change in their grammar made their productions more similar, on the surface, to target productions, as evidenced by a higher number of words with final stress in this stage than in the previous stage. Note also that, at this stage, some interlanguage productions, such as arába, which is stressed on its second syllable, present interesting insight into what goes on in the L2 acquisition process. These forms have a stress pattern that is neither like the L1 nor like the L2 (even on the surface), and as such, this could not have been initiated on the basis of the L1 grammar or L2 input alone. Furthermore, this presents evidence that grammar change was indeed brought along on a parameter-­by-parameter basis, and not, for example, based on frequency as that would predict a greater number of word finally prominent words overall, irrespective of weight profiles. At the next stage were learners who not only reset Extrametricality from Yes to No, but also reset Headedness from Left to Right, thereby producing iambic, instead of trochaic, utterances. The resulting grammar/parameter settings, as well as sample prosodic trees are exemplified in (8): (8) Stage 3: Stage 1 + Reset Head from Left to Right Ft Ft Ft Ft σ σ σ yu.múr.ta

σ σ σ pòr.ta.kál

σ σ σ a.ra.bá

Extram: No Head: Right Weight-Sens: Yes End-R: Right Direc: R → L Ft-Bin: Yes Iterativity: Yes → 1 learner (low intermediate)

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Through this additional change in the setting of a single parameter, these learners managed to place final stress on a greater number of Turkish words. This was because not only words ending in a closed/heavy syllable, but also those ending in a light syllable immediately preceded by another light syllable could now be stressed on their final syllable, as the grammar is now iambic. Notice, however, that words that end in a light syllable immediately preceded by a heavy/ closed syllable (e.g. yumurta) still do not bear final stress. This is because, as is also demonstrated in (8), Weight-Sensitivity is still set to Yes at this stage. Thus a heavy syllable, when available, must be stressed. Stressing yumurta on its final syllable would, in contrast, lead to a weight-insensitive iamb. To put it another way, the fact that Weight-Sensitivity is set to Yes, which helped learners achieve some finally stressed words in the previous stage (where the grammar was trochaic), prevents learners at this stage from having finally stressed words all along. The logical next step, therefore, would be to reset Weight-Sensitivity from its Yes to No value, thereby having word final stress for all types of words, irrespective of syllable structure profile. No such stage has, however, emerged. No learners had weight-insensitive iambic grammars. This, I believe, is because weight-insensitive iambs are not permitted by the options made available by UG, as has been widely argued in the formal phonological literature (e.g. Hayes 1995; McCarthy & Prince 1986). Instead, some learners chose to lengthen final open syllables, thereby turning final light syllables into heavy, which they could then stress with a weight-sensitive grammar. This change is illustrated in (9), again with the same three example words: (9) Stage 4: Stage 3 + Final Lengthening Ft Ft Ft Ft Ft σ σ σ yu.mùr.tá: Extram: No Direc: R → L

σ σ σ pòr.ta.kál

σ σ σ a.ra.bá:

Head: Right Weight-Sens: Yes End-R: Right Ft-Bin: Yes Iterativity: Yes + Final length.

→ 3 learners (1 advanced, 2 low intermediate)

Finally, there was only one learner who, in addition to resetting all the parameters reset by the learners that belong to the previous stages, also reset Iterativity from Yes to No, and thus, had only one prominent syllable per word, without any secondary stress. This learner was at the same time the most advanced participant among those tested in our experiments. The grammar of this learner is illustrated in (10), again together with the stress pattern he employed for the three example



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

words. Only one learner was able to reset Iterativity; suggesting that this parameter was extremely difficult to reset. This difficulty could be explained by means of ‘economy’. In other words, resetting Iterativity from Yes to No leads to a greater change in the grammar than resetting other parameters (such as Extrametricality, Head-­Direction, etc.). This is because such a change also affects the destiny of other parameters, such as End-Rule, which is basically dependent on Iterativity, as it is relevant only in iterative grammars (see Özçelik 2011 for a similar argument). (10) Stage 5: Stage 4 + Reset Iterativity from Yes to No Ft Ft Ft σ σ σ yu.mur.tá: Extram: No Direc: R → L

σ σ σ por.ta.kál

σ σ σ a.ra.bá:

Head: Right Weight-Sens: Yes End-R: Right + Final length. Ft-Bin: Yes Iterativity: Yes

→ 1 learner (advanced)

Despite resetting Iterativity to No, this learner’s final (and more prominent) syllables had in general greater duration than nonfinal syllables, indicating that his words still had foot structure, providing evidence once again for the proposal that, once projected, the Foot is impossible to expunge from the grammar. In sum, the findings of the current study indicate that, as hypothesized, although French-speaking participants had no difficulty placing prominence on word-final syllables of Turkish words, English-speaking learners had significant problems in doing so. Also, even when they were able to stress Turkish words on the final syllable, they did this by means of having foot structure, unlike French-­ speaking learners. In other words, once the Foot was projected in the L1, it was impossible to rid the grammar of it, as proposed in this paper. Having failed to expunge the Foot from the grammar, parameter resetting occurred on the basis of the input, (i.e. word-finally prominent Turkish words). This, in turn, has led to several developmental paths for English-speaking learners of Turkish, as has been summarized in (6) through (10). However, it should be noted, that given the low number of participants, one cannot rule out the possibility that acquisition of lower-level prosody is still on-going for all learners, even for the most advanced ones. It is possible that a study with more (advanced) L2 learners may show that L2 learners are able to discard the Foot from their grammar. Such a result would, of course, suggest that expunging the Foot is not impossible, but extremely difficult.

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3. Acquisition of Turkish phrase- and sentence-level prosody Having examined the L2 acquisition of lower-level prosodic structures in Turkish, we now move on to the L2 acquisition of higher-level prosody (particularly sentential stress) in the same language. What is meant by sentential stress in this paper is ‘neutral prominence’, which is observed in cases of broad focus. Cases of broad focus involve all new contexts, which are independent of information structural mediation but dependent only on the phonological and/or syntactic parameter settings employed by a given language. The paper does not investigate focal prominence (i.e. prominence that is observed in contexts of narrow/contrastive focus) (see Ladd 1996) for a number of reasons why the former is more interesting for phonologists to investigate). Let us start with some background information on the way sentential stress is often taught in the Turkish language classroom. Turkish sentential stress is generally assumed, by grammarians and educators, to fall on the word immediately preceding the verb (see (11)) and L2 learners of Turkish are explicitly taught this: (11) a. Taught rule: Stress the element immediately preceding the verb, as in the following sentence: b. Ben çocúk gör-dü-m. I child see-PAST-1st.sg “I saw a child.”

Although this rule can capture most cases of sentential stress in Turkish, and it is assumed to hold true by many Turkish linguists (see Demircan 1996; Erguvanlı 1984; Erkü 1983; Kılıçaslan 1994; Kornfilt 1997 among others) and followed in many language textbooks, it is wrong and – crucially – linguistically impossible (see below). The strength of this observation has been challenged in recent years because in Turkish even verbs themselves or sentence-initial subjects can receive neutral sentential prominence (e.g. İşsever 2003; Özçelik & Nagai 2011; Özge 2012). Therefore, if L2 learners are guided by UG (e.g. White 1989b, 2003), we expect them to figure this out even if the input is not entirely sufficient to lead them to the correct analysis. This would lend phonological support to previous syntactic studies such as Belikova (2008, 2013), which similarly investigated the role of ‘misleading instruction’, rather than ‘lack of instruction’, in L2 acquisition in reference to UG. If, however, only domain-general problem-solving skills are operative in L2 acquisition (e.g. Bley-Vroman 1990), L2 learners could hypothesize unnatural grammars that make sense pedagogically. After all, the rule in (11) is pedagogically rational. In fact, it is much easier to learn or internalize (or teach) than the



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

correct rule(s) of higher level prosody in Turkish (see details below). Whether or not L2 learners can successfully eliminate rules such as (11), thus, has important implications for L2 theory, which will be the focus of the remainder of this paper. 3.1

Phrase- and sentence-level stress in Turkish: Investigating the prosody-syntax interface

The generalization in (11) captures most sentential stress cases in Turkish, because this position is also the focus position in this language (Inkelas & Orgun 2003; Kornfilt 1997). Therefore, stressing this position will never be incorrect (on a focused interpretation). That is, it a pedagogically reasonable generalization. Moreover, neutral prominence generally happens to fall on this position (see below), even when the pre-predicate constituent is not focused. However, this rule is, by no means, linguistically correct or even possible. There is no such language where sentential stress consistently falls on the penultimate word or constituent in the sentence (i.e. the preverbal position in the case of Turkish), as sentential stress/prominence is assigned structurally, not linearly. Furthermore, within the framework of Prosodic Phonology (see Nespor & Vogel 1986; Selkirk 1984, 1986), also adopted here, there should not be such a language because sentential stress is assigned through a complex interaction of the constituents of the Prosodic Hierarchy (such as the PWd, the PPh and the intonational phrase (I)) and syntax, resulting in a much more complex situation than what is described in (11). In other words, no single alignment of prosodic constituents (or combination of prosodic parameters targeting the head direction of those constituents) will result in such a language (where sentential prominence is determined based on the linear order of syntactic arguments or prosodic constituents). This is because prosodic heads are assumed to be universally either leftmost or rightmost at all levels of the Prosodic Hierarchy, and whether the leftmost or rightmost constituent is chosen as the head depends on the level of the hierarchy and the language-particular parameter settings. In sum, the rule in (11) is one that is linguistically impossible. Turkish stress, in fact, falls on the leftmost PWd in a PPh (Kabak & Vogel 2001) (indicated in boldface in (11) and the rest of the paper), and on the rightmost PPh in an I (the head of which is underlined in (13) and the rest of this paper) (Özçelik & Nagai 2010, 2011). Note that PWd boundaries are not indicated in the following examples for the sake of simplicity, but they correspond, at least in these examples, to orthographic words. Notice also that (12b) and (13b) are identical strings with different prosodic constituency.

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(12) a. [güzél çocúk]PPh beautiful kid “beautiful kid” b. [ó adám]PPh4 that man “that man” (13) a. [[Güzél çocúk]PPh [ev-é gel-dí]PPh]I beautiful kid home-Dat come-PAST “The beautiful kid came home.” b. [[ó]PPh [adám]PPh ]I that man “That is a man.”

As illustrated in these examples, in Turkish, the head of a PPh is the leftmost PWd, and the head of an I is the rightmost PPh, a case much more complex than what is depicted by the rule in (11). Examine (14), where this is illustrated via prosodic trees: (14) a. [güzél çocúk]PPh PPh

PWd PWd

güzel çocuk b. [[Güzél çocúk]PPh [ev-é gel-dí]PPh]I I

PPh PWd



PPh PWd

Güzel çocuk

PWd

PWd

eve

geldi

With these prosodic representations in mind, let us now move on to a special case from Turkish that lies at the prosody-syntax interface and involves bare nouns. 4. A single (C)V syllable can be prosodified in Turkish, and there does not seem to be a Minimal Word requirement. This is probably because most words in Turkish do not have foot structure, irrespective of whether they are content words or function words, as proposed in Özçelik (2013, 2014, to appear).



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

This special case makes it possible to disentangle the predictions of rule (11) from those of the correct prosodic representations that stem from the prosodic parameters mentioned above. Bare nouns in Turkish are ambiguous between a definite and an indefinite interpretation (e.g. Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kornfilt 1997; Özçelik & Nagai 2010, 2011). A sentence like Man arrived could, therefore, have two different readings, given in (15a) and (15b): (15) a. Adam gel-di. b. Adam gel-di. man arrive-PAST man arrive-PAST “A man arrived.” “The man arrived.”

Although (15a) and (15b) look exactly the same as they are identical strings, they differ in terms of prosodic structure. Whereas (15a) is composed of only one PPh, (15b) is composed of two PPhs, as illustrated in (16a) vs. (16b) (see also (12b) vs. (13b)) (examples from Özçelik & Nagai 2010, 2011): (16) a. [[Adám gel-dí]PPh]I b. [[Adám]PPh [gel-dí]PPh]I man arrive-PAST man arrive-PAST “A man arrived.” “The man arrived.”

Tree representations for these two sentences are presented in (17a) and (17b), respectively: (17) a.

b.

I PPh

I PPh

PPh

PWd

PWd

PWd

PWd

adam

geldi

adam

geldi

Özçelik & Nagai (2010, 2011) argue, based on these facts, that the indefinite adam ‘man’ in (14a) or (15a) remains within the same syntactic projection as the verb (and thus sharing the same PPh with it). However, the definite adam ‘man’ in (15b) or (16b) is external to the root-VP in syntax (thus creating its own PPh domain). Crucially, this means that sentential stress will fall on the first word in (15a) and (16a), and the last word in (15b) and (16b), meaning that the rule in (11) will fail for sentences like (16b). Since the prosody in (16b) is also used for topicalization constructions in Turkish, input data will also not be sufficient to lead learners to the correct prosodic representations.

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This takes us back to the research question, posed above: Will learners still be able to reach target-like representations despite all the challenges mentioned here? 3.2

L2 acquisition of sentential stress

In accordance with the FTFA Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse 1996), I hypothesize that L2 learners of Turkish with L1 English will not internalize (i.e. they will not be affected by) linguistically-misleading classroom generalizations such as (11) (see Belikova 2008, 2013 for more discussion on this line of reasoning), and thus be able to acquire the difference between (16a) and (16b). Success is also predicted by the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) (Goad, White & Steele 2003; Goad & White 2004), which allows full access to UG in syntax but access through existing L1 prosodic representations in phonology (cf. Goad & White 2008). Accordingly, although English stresses the subject of unaccusative sentences with both definite and indefinite subjects (e.g. Ladd 1996; Selkirk 1984; Zubizarreta 1998), using a structure like (17a), L1 English-speaking learners of L2 Turkish should also be able to use (17b) correctly. More specifically, they should be able to do this either by combining two PPhs, a strategy that exists in the L1 or by using the prosody of unergative constructions available in the L1, which is similar to (17b), though for a different reason. In English unergatives, the rightmost PWd is the head of a PPh, as well as the rightmost PPh being the head of an I (i.e. in the default case, all heads at higher levels are rightmost unlike Turkish (Ladd 1996). Being able to produce Turkish sentences with either prosody should not, then, be a problem for L1 English speakers, within the PTH. In addition, according to the FTFA, they should be able to use the correct prosody in the right context despite the following factors; (i) the L1-L2 differences in the usage of these prosodic structures; (i) the differences regarding the values of the parameters assigning head status to prosodic constituents, and (iii) a rule like (11). 3.3

Study 2

In order to test these hypotheses, several elicited production tasks in the form of interviews have been conducted with adult English-speaking learners of Turkish. Elicited production tasks were chosen, because highly specific contexts and scenarios were needed in order to elicit the relevant utterances that rarely occur in spontaneous speech.



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

As such, the number of participants was kept rather small: two advanced L1 English learners of L2 Turkish (whose proficiency was confirmed independently by a cloze test). They received instruction according to the pedagogically reasonable/linguistically incorrect rule (11). This has been confirmed as a result of a detailed examination of the textbooks learners used and an interview with the teacher. Each participant produced approximately 2000 utterances during the interviews. There were three interviews with Participant 1 and two interviews with Participant 2. I focus, here, on one comparison (i.e. the one between sentences like (16a) and (16b), repeated as (18a) and (18b)): (18) (= (16)) a. [[Adám gel-dí]PPh]I vs. b. [[Adám]PPh [gel-dí]PPh]I man arrive-PAST man arrive-PAST “A man arrived.” “The man arrived.”

Sentences like (19) or (20), on the other hand, were not included in the analysis: (19) [[Adám]PPh [ev-é gel-dí]PPh]I → vague between the use man home-Dat arrive-PAST of rule (11) and the “The man arrived home.” correct rules given in 3.1 (20) [[İyí adám gel-dí]PPh]I → solves the vagueness of sentences good man arrive-PAST with indef. subjects like (18a), “A good man arrived” but few examples found in the data

Forms like (19) were not included, because they are ambiguous with respect to what is being tested. In other words, if learners produce such sentences with the correct stress pattern, it is not entirely clear whether this has been done because they have used the correct prosodic structures (i.e. based on the parameters PPh-head=leftmost and I-head=rightmost), or because they have simply employed the rule in (11). As for (20), even though this would have helped resolve a similar case of ambiguity caused by simple sentences with indefinite subjects such as (18a), this was not included in the analysis because there were very few examples of such sentences in learners’ production. The rarity of such examples in the data could be due to the fact that when the noun is modified with an element like an adjective, there is a greater possibility for that noun to be definite than indefinite semantically.

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3.4

Results and discussion

The results confirm our hypotheses. Both participants stressed the correct constituent more than 95% of the time in both (16a) and (16b)-type of sentences (i.e. simple sentences composed of a predicate and an indefinite or a definite subject). The results from both participants are summarized below in Table 2 and 3: Table 2.  Results for Participant 1 Participant 1

Sentences with an indefinite subject

Sentences with a definite subject

52  1 98.11

83  4 95.40

Sentences with an indefinite subject

Sentences with a definite subject

45  2 95.74

68  2 97.14

Correct Incorrect Percentage correct

Table 3.  Results for Participant 2 Participant 2 Correct Incorrect Percentage correct

The purpose of the second study was to investigate whether or not L2 learners can acquire linguistic representations constricted by UG despite linguistically-­ misleading classroom generalizations such as (11), and despite the lack of sufficient input to lead them to the correct analysis. I have hypothesized that if UG is available to L2 Turkish learners, they should be able to unlearn a linguistically impossible rule like (11). In other words, if interlanguage grammars are restricted by the options provided by UG, there should be no reason, I have argued, for learners to assume that a UG-incompatible rule such as (11) would hold true, no matter how pedagogically reasonable it is. The results of the current study have confirmed this hypothesis: The participants correctly placed sentential stress on the first PWd within the last PPh in the I, as per the correct PPh- and I-level stress/prominence rules of Turkish (see Özçelik & Nagai 2010, 2011). In addition, they did so more than 95% of the time, irrespective of this strategy stressing the word (or phrase) immediately preceding the predicate as in (16a) (a sentence with an indefinite subject), or, crucially, the predicate itself as in (16b) (a sentence with a definite subject). Note that, in the latter case – for sentences like (16b) – the correct stress pattern could not have been



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

reached by using rule (11), for this rule fails to account for the non-pre-predicate stress pattern observed in such sentences. The sentence-final stress pattern achieved for constructions like (16b) could not, likewise, have been accomplished by using a simple strategy that says, “Stress the predicate/verb in sentences with a definite subject, but stress the subject in those with an indefinite subject,” for it is not always the case that sentential stress/ prominence falls on the predicate when a sentence has a definite subject, as illustrated by examples like (14b) or (19). In these sentences, sentential prominence happens to fall on the constituent immediately preceding the predicate – as would also be coincidentally predicted by rule (11) – for this constituent is the first PWd within the last PPh in the I. The participants’ production of these sentences was also target-like (yet the analysis presented here did not focus on this issue). As such, such a strategy, which makes use of definiteness and overlooks the facts of the syntax-prosody interface or the prosodic parameters of Turkish, could not have been the factor behind participants’ correct productions. Likewise, this knowledge learners seem to have could not have come from instruction, either. In fact, instruction leads them to an incorrect analysis, as explained above. Similarly, input is not very helpful to eliminate the effects of misleading instruction: the prosodic structure in (16b), the one not captured by rule (11), is used also for topicalization constructions in Turkish. Thus, a learner faced with such a prosodic structure will not necessarily feel the need to revise his or her knowledge gained from (11), unless UG is at work. Instead the learner will assume that such constructions involve topicalization. Moreover, sentential stress happens to fall on the pre-predicate position in many cases (e.g. (14b) and (19)), thereby confirming the learner’s initial incorrect assumption about the target language. Finally, negative evidence is also probably not available in this domain. In other words, a learner always producing sentences consistent with (11) will not be wrong (though problems might arise in interpreting) because such sentences will be correct at least on a focused interpretation of the pre-predicate constituent. This is because, as mentioned above, this position is also the focus position in Turkish. Therefore, an L2 Turkish learner who consistently chooses the wrong stress pattern in line with (11) will not be corrected. The knowledge could, therefore, have been made possible only by means of access to UG. The findings are, thus, in line with such approaches as the FTFA and the PTH. As expected by the FTFA, although L1 and L2 differ with respect to the relevant prosodic and syntactic parameters, L2 learners were able to reach target-­ like representations. This is only possible via UG access, for neither teaching nor input is helpful to learners in the process. Likewise, some of the other non-­ linguistic strategies like the ones mentioned above will not be helpful for them,

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either. Nevertheless, the results are not in conflict with the Full Access without Transfer view (e.g. Flynn & Martohardjono 1994) (following White’s 2003 usage of the term), since no lower-level learners of Turkish have been tested to reveal (initial) transfer effects. Similarly, as expected by the PTH, the learners were able to use both prosodic representations in (16) (= (17)), for both could be reached based on L1 prosodic structures. In sum, learners were not only able to access all the relevant prosodic structures as would be predicted by the PTH, but they also used them correctly in the right context, as expected by UG-based approaches such as the FTFA. Finally, note that Study 2 was conducted only with two advanced-level participants. Also, these two participants were not among the participants of Study 1. Therefore, the findings should be treated with caution, particularly while comparing the results of the two studies. Nevertheless, I believe that the level of successful representations achieved by the two advanced learners, despite all the challenges in the learning conditions, is still revealing for L2 acquisition of sentence-level prosody. 4. General discussion and conclusions Acquisition of L2 Turkish phonology is a relatively under studied area. This is even more so when it comes to autosegmental phonology, of which prosody is a major component. This paper has investigated acquisition of both lower- and higher-­level prosody in Turkish, examining the results of two different studies designed to explore the two different levels of prosody. The findings are revealing for our understanding of how acquisition of prosody works in the L2. In addition, the findings can contribute in significant ways to our knowledge of certain theoretical issues such as the role of UG in adult L2 acquisition. The two studies have demonstrated, for example, that L2 acquisition of prosody, both at lower and higher levels, is constrained by the options made available by UG, whether this means convergence to the target grammar as in the case of higher-level prosody or divergence from the target grammar as with lower-level prosody. Regarding lower-level prosody, the findings of Study 1 (Section 2) provide evidence for theories of L2 acquisition that attribute a central role to UG (e.g. White 1989b, 2003). First of all, it has been found that the interlanguage grammars of the English-speaking participants at each stage of the path (see (6) through (10)) are all possible grammars constrained by UG, although they are neither like the L1 nor the L2. As such, this knowledge could not have been acquired on the basis of L1 transfer or L2 input. It could only have come from UG. Second, certain stages (i.e. interlanguage characteristics) such as a weight-insensitive iambic system that



Chapter 1.  Acquisition of L2 Turkish prosody

permits feet like (HĹ) and (HH ´ ) (i.e. with a heavy syllable in foot-dependent position), did not emerge in the productions of the English-speaking participants, although this would be a pedagogically reasonable stage (‘cognitively most logical’ stage after (8)). This was because such a grammar is not permitted by the inventory of feet provided by UG (e.g. Hayes 1995; McCarthy & Prince 1986). Instead, learners lengthened final open syllables/heads of iambs (see (9) and (10)), in accordance with universal tendencies (Hayes 1995). Third, the phonetic cues for stress, for the English-speaking participants with both trochaic and iambic grammars, were consistent with universal tendencies in that trochaic grammars used intensity, whereas iambic systems used duration in cueing stressed syllables (Hayes 1995). Crucially, when these learners changed from a trochaic grammar to iambic grammar, they also changed the dominant correlate of stress from intensity to duration, although duration is not a correlate of word-level prominence in footless languages like L2 Turkish, nor is it a correlate important to the same extent in trochaic languages like L1 English. Similar to data pertaining to lower-level prosody, data from the acquisition of higher-level prosody in Turkish (Section 3) provide insight into the role of UG in L2 acquisition. Based on the results of an experimental study with two English-speaking advanced learners of L2 Turkish, it was concluded that higher-­ level interlanguage prosody is also constrained by UG. This conclusion is reached based on the finding that, unlike Study 1, the participants tested in Study 2 used target-like prosodic structures in representing Turkish sentential stress, and that they were able to do so despite the fact that L1 and L2 differ with respect to the relevant parameters, and that the participants were previously taught an incorrect sentential stress rule. The findings of Study 2 indicate that L2 learners can go beyond instruction, and, where relevant, they can eliminate its negative effects because their grammars prohibit mental representations that are not constrained by UG. L2 learners’ success in this study cannot be explained based on input, for input data are conflicting in this domain. Negative evidence, likewise, seems unavailable. All in all, as with Study 1, Study 2 provides evidence for UG in L2 acquisition. Furthermore, the findings of both studies are clearly at odds with the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (e.g. Bley-Vroman 1990) and other approaches that attribute no place to UG in adult L2 acquisition (e.g. Beck 1998; Clahsen & Hong 1995). In these approaches, only domain-general problem-solving skills are operative in L2 acquisition, and adult L2 learners do not have access to UG. However, as the results of both studies demonstrated, English-speaking learners of L2 Turkish were able to converge on the grammars of native Turkish speakers. When convergence was not possible, they were able to make various changes in their grammar through parameter resetting. In other words, parameter resetting

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was also possible, contra ‘no parameter resetting’ approaches such as Hawkins and Chan (1997). This was possible despite misleading instruction. Finally, it should be noted that the two studies also have some crucial implications for Turkish language pedagogy. It is the lower-level prosody in Turkish that needs extra attention in the language classroom. This is because this area is particularly prone to problems, particularly for learners whose L1 requires words to be footed as in English. As presenting learners with positive evidence is not sufficient in these cases, Turkish language teachers would also need to provide negative evidence by explicitly working on learners’ pronunciation. For higher-level prosody, on the other hand, positive evidence seems to be sufficient to lead students to the correct analysis of Turkish sentential stress (although they had been taught an incorrect rule). This implies that the pedagogical emphasis in the Turkish language classroom should particularly be on lower-level prosody such as word stress, but not on higher-level prosody such as sentential prominence.

References Akita, M. O. 2006. Global foreign accent and classroom input in L2 perception and production. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia & C. Zaller (eds), 1–14. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. Akita, M. O. 2007. Global foreign accent and the effectiveness of a prosody-oriented approach in EFL classrooms. In Proceedings of the 31st Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, H. Caunt-Nulton, S. Kulatilake & I. Woo (eds), 46–57. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. Archibald, J. 1992. Transfer of L1 parameter settings: Some evidence from Polish metrics. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 37: 301–339. Archibald, J. 1993. Language Learnability and L2 Phonology: The Acquisition of Metrical Parameters. Dordrecht: Kluwer. doi: 10.1007/978-94-011-2056-2 Archibald, J. 1998. Second language phonology, phonetics, and typology. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20: 190–211. doi: 10.1017/S0272263198002046 Beck, M. L. 1998. L2 acquisition and obligatory head movement: English-speaking learners of German and the local impairment hypothesis. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 20: 311–348. doi: 10.1017/S0272263198003027 Beckman, M. E. 1986. Stress and Non-stress Accent. Dordrecht: Foris.  doi:  10.1515/9783110874020

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Gordon, M. 2014. Disentangling stress and pitch-accent: A typology of prominence at different prosodic levels. In Word Accent: Theoretical and Typological Issues, H. van der Hulst (ed.), 83–118. Cambridge: CUP. doi: 10.1017/CBO9781139600408.005

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Göksel, A. & Kerslake, C. 2005. Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. New York NY: Routledge.  doi:  10.4324/9780203340769

Halle, M. & Vergnaud, J.-R. 1987. An Essay on Stress. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Hawkins, R. & Chan, C. Y. 1997. The partial availability of Universal Grammar in second language acquisition: The ‘failed functional features hypothesis’. Second Language Research 13: 187–226. doi: 10.1191/026765897671476153 Hayes, B. 1981. A Metrical Theory of Stress Rules. PhD dissertation, MIT. (Distributed by Indiana University Linguistics Club). Hayes, B. 1995. Metrical Stress Ttheory: Principles and Case Studies. Chicago IL: The University of Chicago Press. Hualde, J. I., Elordieta, G., Gamind, I. & Smiljanic, R. 2002. From pitch-accent to stress-accent in Basque. In Laboratory Phonology 7, C. Gussenhoven, N. Warner & T. Rietveld (eds), 547–584. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Hyman, L. M. 2014. Do all languages have word accent? In Word Accent: Theoretical and Typological Issues, H. van der Hulst (ed.), 56–82. Cambridge: CUP.  doi:  10.1017/CBO9781139600408.004

Inkelas, S. & Orgun, C. O. 1998. Level (non)ordering in recursive morphology: Evidence from Turkish. In Morphology and its Relation to Phonology and Syntax, S. G. Lapointe, D. K. Brentari & P. M. Farrell (eds), 360–410. Stanford CA: CSLI. Inkelas, S. & Orgun, C. O. 2003. Turkish stress: A review. Phonology 20: 139–161.  doi:  10.1017/S0952675703004482

İşsever, S. 2003. Information structure in Turkish: The word order-prosody interface. Lingua 113: 1025–1053. doi: 10.1016/S0024-3841(03)00012-3 İpek, C. 2011. Phonetic realization of focus with no on-focus pitch-range expansion in Turkish. In Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhs 17), W.-S. Lee & E. Zee (eds), 140–143. İpek, C. & Zubizarreta, M. L. 2014. Nuclear stress as an abstract rhythmic notion: Evidence from Turkish. Paper presented at the 10th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, MIT, Cambridge MA. Jun, S.-A. & Fougeron, C. 2000. A phonological model of French intonation. In Intonation: Analysis, Modelling and Technology, A. Botinis (ed.), 209–242. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kabak, B. & Vogel, I. 2001. The phonological word and stress assignment in Turkish. Phonology 18: 315–360. doi: 10.1017/S0952675701004201 Kamali, B. 2011. Topics at the PF Interface in Turkish. PhD dissertation, Harvard University. Kılıçaslan, Y. 1994. Information Packaging in Turkish. MA thesis, University of Edinburgh. Konrot, A. 1981. Physical correlates of linguistic stress in Turkish. University of Sussex Language Centre Occasional Papers 24: 26–52. Konrot, A. 1987. Stress in Turkish: Is it determined phonologically or morphologically? In Studies on Modern Turkish: Proceedings of the Third Conference on Turkish Linguistics, H. E. Boeschoten & L. T. Verhoeven (eds). Tilburg: Tilburg University Press. Kornfilt, J. 1997. Turkish Grammar. London: Routledge. Ladd, D. R. 1996. Intonational Phonology. Cambridge: CUP. Lieberman, P. 1960. Some acoustic correlates of word stress in American English. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 32: 451–454. doi: 10.1121/1.1908095 Liberman, M. & Prince, A. 1977. On stress and linguistic rhythm. Linguistic Inquiry 8: 249–336. Marcus, M. P. 1980. A Theory of Syntactic Recognition for Natural Language. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.



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McCarthy, J. & Prince, A. 1986. Prosodic morphology. Ms, Brandeis University and University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Nespor M. & Vogel, I. 1986. Prosodic Phonology. Dordrecht: Foris. Özçelik, Ö. 2011. Redefining the Prosodic Hierarchy. Paper presented at Phonology in the 21st Century: In Honour of Glyne Piggott, McGill University, Montréal. Özçelik, Ö. 2013. Exceptions in stress assignment: Feet in input. In Proceedings of 40th Annual Meeting of the North East Linguistic Society (NELS 40), S. Kan, C. Moore-Cantwell & R. Staubs (eds). Amherst MA: GLSA. Özçelik, Ö. 2014. Prosodic faithfulness to foot edges: The case of Turkish stress. Phonology 31: 229–269. doi: 10.1017/S0952675714000128 Özçelik, Ö. To appear. The Foot is not an obligatory constituent of the Prosodic Hierarchy: “stress” in Turkish, French and child English. The Linguistic Review [forthcoming 2017]. Özçelik, Ö & Nagai, M. 2010. Possible syntactic subject positions in Turkish: Evidence from phonology. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL 6) [MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 61], Hiroki Maezawa & Azusa Yokogoshi (eds). Cambridge MA: MITWPL. Özçelik, Ö. & Nagai, M. 2011. Multiple subject positions: A case of perfect match between syntax and prosody. In Proceedings of the 28th West Coast Conference for Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 28), M. Byram & B. Tomaszewicz (eds), 303–312. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. Özge, U. 2012. Notes on focus projection in Turkish. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, É. Kincses-Nagy & M. Biacsi (eds), 141–154. Szeged: Studia Uralo-Altaica. Pater, J. 1997. Metrical parameter missetting in second language acquisition. In Focus on Phonological Acquisition [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 16], S. J. Hannahs & M. Young-Scholten (eds), 235–262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/lald.16 Peterson, G. & Lehiste, I. 1960. Duration and syllable nuclei in English. Journal of the Acoustic Society of America 32: 693–703. doi: 10.1121/1.1908183 Post, B. 2003. French phrasing and accentuation in different speaking styles. In Oxford University Working Papers in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics 8, E. Grabe & D. Wright (eds), 69–83. Schwartz, B. & Sprouse, R. 1994. Word order and nominative case in nonnative language acquisition: A longitudinal study of (L1 Turkish) German interlanguage. In Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 8], T. Hoekstra & B. D. Schwartz (eds), 317–368. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  doi:  10.1075/lald.8.14sch

Schwartz, B. & Sprouse, B. 1996. L2 cognitive states and the full transfer/full access model. Second Language Research 12: 40–72. doi: 10.1177/026765839601200103 Selkirk, E. 1984. Phonology and Syntax: The Relation Between Sound and Structure. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Selkirk, E. 1986. On derived domains in sentence phonology. Phonology 3: 371–405.  doi:  10.1017/S0952675700000695

Tremblay, A. 2007. Bridging the Gap between Theoretical Linguistics and Psycholinguistics in L2 Phonology: The Acquisition and Processing of Word Stress by French Canadian L2 learners of English. PhD dissertation, University of Hawai’i.

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Trofimovich, P. & Baker, W. 2006. Learning second language suprasegmentals: Effect of L2 experience on prosody and fluency characteristics of L2 speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 28: 1–30. doi: 10.1017/S0272263106060013 Tsimpli, I. M. & Sorace, A. 2006. Differentiating interfaces: L2 performance in syntax–semantics and syntax–discourse phenomena. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, D. Bamman, T. Magnitskaia, & C. Zaller (eds), 653–664. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. White, L. 1989a. Linguistic universals, markedness and learnability: comparing two different approaches. Second Language Research 5: 127–140. doi: 10.1177/026765838900500202 White, L. 1989b. Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 1]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/lald.1 White, L. 2003. Second Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar. Cambridge: CUP.  doi:  10.1017/CBO9780511815065

Zubizarreta, M. L. 1998. Prosody, Focus, and Word Order. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.

Chapter 2

Decreasing dependence on orthography in phonological development Evidence from vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage Öner Özçelik and Rex A. Sprouse Indiana University

Despite the general transparency of standard Turkish orthography, it fails to distinguish the (not fully predictable) contrast between coronal vs. dorsal laterals following back vowels in certain loanwords: the laterals in /koɫ/ and /rol/ are both represented as . This contrast results in non-canonical vowel harmony, where the backness of a suffix vowel is determined by the lateral, rather than by the preceding vowel (e.g. /koɫ-a/ , but /rol-e/ ). While early English-Turkish learners performed at a significantly higher level of accuracy on selecting the target suffix vowel in these contexts with auditory-­ only presentation of the stimulus than with auditory and written presentation, intermediate and advanced learners come to rely more on auditory stimuli and less on orthography. Keywords: Turkish, L2 acquisition, phonology, orthography, vowel harmony

1. Introduction This paper seeks to contribute to the growing literature on the role of Target Language (TL) orthography on phonological development in (adult) second language (L2) acquisition. While most research in this area has focused on issues such as category formation, phoneme discrimination in perception and production, or lexical retrieval (Erdener & Burnham 2005; Escudero & Wanrooij 2010; HayesHarb, Nicol & Barker 2010 among many others), we concentrate on the relationship between orthography and a complex phonological rule, one which is not taught in Turkish language courses, and we consider the role of orthography over the course of L2 phonological development. More specifically, typical classroom doi 10.1075/lald.59.03ozc © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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learners of Turkish receive extensive instruction on rules of Turkish vowel harmony. These rules yield TL-congruent results in most cases. Typical classroom learners quickly become adept at applying these rules successfully (e.g. ev-e /ev-e/ ‘home.dat’ vs. av-a /av-a/ ‘hunting.dat’, where the backness feature of the dative suffix is determined by the backness feature of the immediately preceding vowel). However, there are special cases where the standardly taught rules yield TL-­deviant results because of the effect of an ‘exceptional’ consonant (whose backness feature is not marked orthographically) intervening between the trigger vowel (whose backness feature is marked orthographically) and the target vowel. In this paper, we report the results of an empirical study designed to tease apart English-­Turkish L2 learners’ (L2ers) reliance, at three different proficiency levels, on orthography in the computation of Turkish vowel harmony rules by comparing trials with both orthographic and auditory stimuli against trials with auditory stimuli alone. Our results suggest that classroom learners come to rely less on orthographic stimuli and more on auditory stimuli over time. This paper is structured in the following way. In Section 2, we first situate the issue above within the broader context of what accounts for both similarities and differences between typical child native language (L1) and adult L2 acquisition outcomes. We then state two competing hypotheses about the role of orthography in the developing interlanguage phonology of typical classroom learners: The Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis and the Increasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis. In Section 3, we review a range of facts about vowel harmony in Turkish, including a class of cases where vowel harmony in suffixes is governed not by the features of the vowel in the immediately preceding syllable, but rather by a feature of an intervening lateral consonant. The crucial cases, illustrated by rol-e /rol-e/1 ‘role.dat’, involve a back vowel followed by a non-velarized (i.e. “light”) /l/; in such cases, the suffix vowel harmonizes with the [–back] (or Coronal) feature of the lateral, rather than with the [+back] feature of the vowel in the preceding syllable. Despite its generally transparent nature, Turkish orthography fails to mark the crucial feature contrast on the intervening lateral that governs vowel harmony in these cases. However, an auditory presentation of unsuffixed forms of relevant words (e.g. rol /rol/ ‘role’) and pseudowords would (in principle)2 suffice to determine the value of the relevant feature of the lateral and thus to enable the listener to calculate the appropriate feature(s) of the vowel in an attached suffix (here -/e/ 1. As noted earlier, non-velarized /l/ contrasts with the velarized /ɫ/ attested in Turkish words such as yola /yoɫa/ ‘road.dat’. 2. We explain, in Section 3, the additional phonological principle required to ensure the TL-­ congruent computation of vowel harmony.



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

‘dat’, rather than the -/a/ allomorph of the suffix that the preceding vowel /o/ would lead one to expect). We show experimentally that English-Turkish L2ers who have acquired the basics of Turkish vowel harmony but are still in relatively early stages of their acquisition of Turkish are ‘misled’ by Turkish orthography when presented with bimodal (orthographic and auditory) stimuli and asked to add harmonizing suffixes. The Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis predicts that as development continues, such learners will come to rely more on auditory stimulus. On the other hand, the Increasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis predicts that learners will not only rely on (potentially misleading) orthographic stimuli in early stages of acquisition, but will come to rely more heavily on orthography as they progress in their acquisition of Turkish. Section 4 describes the design of the experiment we employed to test the predictions of the two hypotheses and the participants who took part in our experiment. The results presented in Section 5 show that the English-Turkish L2ers are significantly more likely to provide the TL-like allomorph of the requested suffix containing a [–back] vowel after the sequence [+back] vowel followed by “light” /l/ when the stimulus is exclusively auditory than when the stimulus is both auditory and orthographic. This is consistent with the Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis, but unexpected on the Increasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis. In Section 6, we will summarize our findings and briefly discuss potential pedagogical implications. 2. Theoretical motivation There can be little doubt that the typical outcome of adult L2 acquisition is strikingly different from the typical outcome of child L1 acquisition. The L2 acquisition research literature presents several hypotheses regarding the reason for such differences including the Monitor Model (Krashen 1981), the Competing Cognitive Systems Hypothesis (Felix 1985), the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis (Bley-Vroman 1990), the Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse 1996), the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou 2007), and many others.3 One potentially crucial source of differences between child L1ers and adult L2ers lies in the typical input for child L1ers and that for 3. The various models extant in the literature make empirically distinct predictions about the precise nature and extent of the outcome differences between child L1 and adult L2 acquisition. Further discussion would exceed the bounds of this paper.

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adult L2ers, at least in the contemporary world because of the role of literacy.4 Unlike most L2ers, normally developing children have acquired most of the phonology and morphosyntax of their L1s at the point where literacy development begins. If their L1 has an alphabetic writing system, then their new learning challenge is to add graphemic representations for elements of a language that they already know through the medium of sounds. Over the years, it is, of course, possible that a given native speaker might come to know any number of new lexical items first through the written word, but taken as a whole, native speakers acquire spoken language before they acquire written language. Bassetti (2009) cogently discusses ways in which the experience of a (potentially highly) literate adult acquiring a new language in a typical classroom setting is very different. Such a learner not only begins the L2 acquisition process already accustomed to the written representation of language, but also brings the expectation (and has this expectation reinforced by the structure of classroom instruction) that all acquisition of the new language necessarily entails the acquisition of written representations. Particularly when instruction occurs in a traditional academic context, reading and writing assignments will be given from the very first day of instruction, and examinations will be based primarily on accuracy on written tasks. Such a learner is likely to first encounter the majority of new vocabulary items and morphosyntactic patterns in written form (or through both written and auditory input). In sum, with respect to the role of literacy, adult L2 acquisition in the instructed context is different from L1 acquisition in two major ways: (i) L2ers usually bring a fully developed orthographic system (in addition to a fully acquired L1) to the acquisition task and (ii) they start learning the L2 orthography from the very beginning of the L2 acquisition process, unlike what happens in L1 acquisition. The standard orthographies of languages with alphabetic writing systems vary with respect to their phonetic/phonemic transparency (closeness of fit between graphemic representations, on the one hand, and, phonemic representations and/or phonetic realizations5 on the other). This can have an impact on the 4. In this paper, we consider only (L1 and L2) learners in contemporary societies, where school-­based literacy is overwhelmingly the norm. 5. In developing the “classical” theory of the phoneme, linguists of the American Structuralist School of the first half of the Twentieth Century pointed out that alphabetic writing systems tend to originate as phonemic representations of a particular language, because this is the level of analysis most directly accessible to native speakers without phonetic training, and this level best serves the needs of differentiating meaningful linguistic elements. Alphabetic writing systems acquire degrees of opacity for a variety of reasons: the long-term stability of written representations despite sound changes affecting the spoken language; borrowing both the pronunciation and the written representation of new lexemes from languages with a different lexeme-phoneme correspondences; orthographic reform designed to highlight etymology or



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

expectations that literate speakers of those languages bring to the task of interpreting a new orthographic system. For example, noting that Turkish orthography is generally very transparent, while English orthography is rather opaque, Erdener and Burnham (2005) found that the phonetic transparency of Spanish orthography gave Turkish speakers an advantage over English speakers in repeating Spanish words, while the relative phonetic opacity of Irish orthography reversed the outcome, placing English speakers at an advantage over Turkish speakers in repeating Irish words. There is the added complication that the L1 and the TL might employ straightforwardly different alphabets (e.g. Latin vs. Cyrillic) or that both might appear to employ the same “basic alphabet” (perhaps with different sets of diacritics), but any number of the graphemes might be typically associated with quite distinct sound values (as for example with , , , , and across the languages using the Latin alphabet). Hayes-Harb et al. (2010) tested English speakers on their ability to learn the pronunciation of pseudowords on the basis of auditory presentation plus (1) no written presentation, (2) a written presentation consistent with conventional English orthography, or (3) a written presentation inconsistent with conventional English orthography. They found that the third group’s pronunciation of the pseudowords exhibited significant interference from the English-deviant written presentation. Clearly, instructors and textbooks typically inform learners about certain differences between the orthographic systems of their L1 and the TL; however, textbook presentations generally focus on major differences and omit many details. In any case, it is far from clear what type of experience with the new system is typically necessary for learners to fully adjust. In fact, it appears to be an under-investigated empirical question whether the ultimate attainment of highly proficient near-native L2ers is psycholinguistically indistinguishable from native speakers in the domain of orthography.6 In her review of recent studies on the effect of orthography on phonological acquisition, Bassetti (2009) concludes that the currently available evidence distinguish homophones, etc. Since the English orthographic system is older than one millennium and the current Turkish orthographic system originated approximately one century ago, it is not at all surprising that Turkish orthography is much more transparent than English orthography. 6. This may prove a rather vexed question for empirical research because of the problem of establishing the orthographic competence of “typical” or “average” native writers of languages like English, where the orthography is quite opaque, and there appears to be a wide range of orthographic proficiency among native writers across and within levels of educational achievement. In this paper, we leave to future research the exploration of the acquisition of L2 orthography as an active skill. Here we focus on the effect of reliance on Turkish orthography for the computation of vowel harmony.

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implicates TL orthography in the acquisition of TL phonology. To our knowledge, most of the extant research focuses on the mapping from orthography directly to surface phonetic realization of individual words or pseudowords. Rather little is known at this point about the impact of (potentially “misleading”) TL orthography on the application of TL phonological rules. Nor is it clear whether typical classroom learners, whose literacy development begins virtually on the first day of their exposure to the TL, come to rely more heavily or less heavily on written language as the phonological acquisition process continues into intermediate or advanced stages. In this study, we will compare two broadly stated hypotheses regarding the relative importance of orthography in developing interlanguage systems over time, as stated in (1): (1) a. The Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis: When oracy and literacy are developed in tandem, typical classroom learners come to rely increasingly on auditory input and less on orthographic input as their interlanguage phonological systems develop over time. b. The Increasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis: When oracy and literacy are developed in tandem, typical classroom learners come to rely increasingly on orthographic input as their interlanguage phonological systems develop over time.

If L2ers come to rely less on orthography over time (decreasing dependence on orthography), we might expect that the effect of “misleading” orthographic representations would weaken when such learners are required to apply TL-­ congruent phonological rules whose triggers are not transparently encoded in TL orthography. Conversely, if L2ers become increasingly reliant on orthography over time (increasing dependence on orthography), we might expect that the effect of “misleading” orthographic representations would become even stronger when such learners are required to apply TL-congruent phonological rules whose triggers are obscured by TL orthography. We believe that it is not the case that one of these hypotheses is obviously true a priori. On the reasonable assumption that most English-speaking classroom learners of Turkish come to the acquisition of Turkish as true ab initio learners7

7. This is certainly true in the context of the current study, which was conducted in the United States. We are unaware of the existence of any pre-university Turkish language instructional programs in the entire country. The population of heritage learners of Turkish at US universities approaches zero. Almost every student enrolled in Introductory Turkish I at Indiana University is a genuine ab initio learner. Thus, we recognize that the “typical classroom learner” to whom we refer in our two hypotheses has an experience unlike that, for example, of many students enrolled in Spanish language instruction in the United States, where there are indeed



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

(particularly learners in the traditional academic context where listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills are developed in tandem and much stress is laid on literacy), it is far from obvious whether learners will come to rely more on auditory or more on written input over time. Because of the heterogeneous nature of the experience that learners have with the Turkish language after the first year of instruction, it is not practical to attempt to assess the precise number of hours of spoken Turkish they have heard or the precise number of words of written Turkish they have read. Nevertheless, we believe that it is reasonable to ask the question of whether orthographic or auditory input comes to have priority over time. It is possible to address this question most directly by studying the acquisition of a corner of the TL where these two might provide contradictory evidence for the learner. 3. The L1 English-TL Turkish comparison: A note on Turkish vowel harmony and laterals in the two languages The application of Turkish vowel harmony by English-Turkish L2ers offers an ideal test of the Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis and the Increasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis. In this section, we first provide a basic description of Turkish vowel harmony and its interaction with the distribution of laterals, in both canonical and non-canonical cases. We compare the relevant aspects of Turkish orthography with English orthography and with the most plausible interpretation of Turkish orthography on the part of English-­ Turkish L2ers and explain how this state of affairs provides a clear test of our two competing hypotheses. The vowel inventory of Turkish includes eight vowels, which can be straightforwardly classified with three binary features, [±high], [±back], and [±round], leading to a perfectly symmetric system.8 This is illustrated in (2), with a list of phonemes and corresponding orthographic representations. many heritage language learners and many other learners come to the task with significant exposure to both spoken and written Spanish from the ambient cultural context. 8. We note that this symmetry holds at the phonological level and not, strictly speaking, at the phonetic level. For example, /e/ and /a/ share the features [–high] and [–round], but the phoneme /e/ exhibits allophonic variation ranging from mid [e] to low-mid [ɛ] to low [æ], while the phoneme /a/ is phonetically realized as the low vowel /ɑ/. In the interest of concreteness, we will take the {[+high], [–round], [+back]} feature matrix to correspond to the phoneme we will label /ɨ/, because it is generally realized phonetically as the high, unrounded, central vowel [ɨ] and not the high, unrounded, back vowel [ɯ]. For reasons of space, we cannot review here

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(2) Turkish vowels9 Front vowels High Non-High

Back vowels

Unrounded

Round

Unrounded

Round

/i/ /e/

/y/ /ø/

/ɨ/ /a/

/u/ /o/

Turkish is typologically an agglutinating language with heavy use of suffixes for both inflectional and derivational morphology (e.g. Kornfilt 1997; Underhill 1976). All of the vowels in Turkish suffixes are specified for [±high], but most are underspecified for [±back] (and [±round]) with the latter features filled in through a process of vowel harmony. More precisely, [+high] vowel harmony targets are underspecified for both [±back] and [±round] and the specifications for both these features almost always spread from the vowel in the immediately preceding syllable. On the other hand, unless underlyingly specified for all features and not subject to vowel harmony at all, [–high] vowels of Turkish suffixes can only be [–round] due to the presence of a separate (more general) constraint in Turkish grammar against the presence of [–high] rounded vowels in non-­ initial syllables. Therefore, in these cases it is only the specification for [±back] that spreads from the vowel in the immediately preceding syllable. Consider the examples in (3) and (4), which illustrate the basic paradigm of Turkish vowel harmony using simple monosyllabic roots. (3) Suffix vowel underlyingly specified as [+high]: 3rd person possessive root vowel suffix vowel a. ün-ü [yny] ‘(his) fame’ {[+high] [–back] [+round]} {[+high] [–back] [+round]} b. iș-i [iʃi] ‘(his) work’ {[+high] [–back] [–round]} {[+high] [–back] [–round]} c. kuș-u [kuʃu] ‘(his) bird’ {[+high] [+back] [+round]} {[+high] [+back] [+round]}

all of the competing accounts of the precise phonetics of Turkish vowels, and this would not be relevant to the research questions investigated here. In any case, as will become clear below, this basic phonological analysis allows for an elegant account of vowel harmony in Turkish and is generally adopted by all linguists investigating the language, as well as all pedagogical materials for Turkish with which we are familiar. 9. Throughout this paper, we will abstract away from the allophonic variation associated with Turkish vowels, representing, for example, all instances of non-high front unrounded vowels as /e/ and [e] (although /e/ appears as its allophones [ɛ] and [æ] in certain closed syllables).



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

d. kız-ı [kɨzɨ] ‘(his) girl’ {[+high] [+back] [–round]} e. göz-ü [gøzy] ‘(his) eye’ {[–high] [–back] [+round]} f. ders-i [dersi] ‘(his) class’ {[–high] [–back] [–round]} g. dost-u [dostu] ‘(his) friend’ {[–high] [+back] [+round]} h. at-ı [atɨ] ‘(his) horse’ {[–high] [+back] [–round]}

{[+high] [+back] [–round]} {[+high] [–back] [+round]} {[+high] [–back] [–round]} {[+high] [+back] [+round]} {[+high] [+back] [–round]}

(4) Suffix vowel underlyingly specified as [–high]: dative root vowel suffix vowel a. ün-e [yne] ‘(to the) fame’ {[+high] [–back] [+round]} {[–high] [–back] [–round]} b. iș-e [iʃe] ‘(to the) work’ {[+high] [–back] [–round]} {[–high] [–back] [–round]} c. kuș-a [kuʃa] ‘(to the) bird’ {[+high] [+back] [+round]} {[–high] [+back] [–round]} d. kız-a [kɨza] ‘(to the) girl’ {[+high] [+back] [–round]} {[–high] [+back] [–round]} e. göz-e [gøze] ‘(to the) eye’ {[–high] [–back] [+round]} {[–high] [–back] [–round]} f. ders-e [derse] ‘(to the) class’ {[–high] [–back] [–round]} {[–high] [–back] [–round]} g. dost-a [dosta] ‘(to the) friend’ {[–high] [+back] [+round]} {[–high] [+back] [–round]} h. at-a [ata] ‘(to the) horse’ {[–high] [+back] [–round]} {[–high] [+back] [–round]}

The examples in (3) illustrate vowel harmony with a suffix consisting of a vowel pre-specified as simply [+high], the third person singular possessive suffix -I. The root vowels in the eight examples illustrate all eight logically possible combinations of the three binary features. In each instance, the vowel of the suffix is [+high], but the specifications for the features [±back] and [±round] are simply copied from the root vowel, as indicated by boldface type. For example, the word [gøz] (see (3e)) contains (and ends in) the vowel [ø], which has the features {[–high] [–back] [+round]}. Since the suffix vowel is specified as [+high], it can undergo both front/back and rounding harmony, resulting in a high vowel that is front and rounded, as with [ø], which leads to the vowel [y]. Because the suffix vowel here has four possible realizations, this vowel harmony pattern is often called “four-way vowel harmony” in Turkish textbooks.

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The examples in (4) illustrate vowel harmony with a suffix with a vowel pre-­ specified for [–high], the dative case suffix. In these examples, the vowel of the suffix is [–high] and [–round], and as the vowel is [–high], only the specification for the feature [±back] is copied from the root vowel.10 Using the same example, [gøz], which ends in a vowel with the specifications {[–high] [–back] [+round]}, since the suffix vowel -A is [–high], only the backness feature is copied from the root, and roundness is not, resulting in a suffix vowel that is not only [–high] (which is underlyingly specified) but also [–back] as with the root vowel, but, unlike the root vowel, it is [–round]. Because the suffix vowel here has two possible realizations, this vowel harmony pattern is often called “two-way vowel harmony” in Turkish textbooks. These surface alternations are extremely robust in the auditory input and are transparently represented in the Turkish writing system. Furthermore, English-­ speaking classroom learners of Turkish receive early and extensive instruction on these two primary patterns of vowel harmony. The feature [±back], furthermore, plays a central role in the distribution of the surface variants of the underlyingly underspecified lateral /l/ in Turkish. Consider the examples of typical uninflected native Turkish words in (5). (5) a. [baɫ] bal ‘honey’ dark [ɫ] b. [buɫ] bul ‘to find’ dark [ɫ] c. [soɫgun] solgun ‘pale’ dark [ɫ] d. [ɫaf]11 laf ‘statement’ dark [ɫ] e. [leke] leke ‘dirt’ light [l] f. [bel] bel ‘back’ light [l] g. [kyl] kül ‘ash’ light [l] h. [jelken] yelken ‘sail’ light [l]

When the lateral occurs in the immediate environment of a [+back] vowel, the lateral is realized as a velarized [ɫ], generally known as the “dark” [ɫ], as illustrated in (5a)–(5d). When the lateral occurs in the immediate environment of a [–back] vowel, the lateral is realized as a non-velarized [l], generally known as the “light” [l], as illustrated in (5e)–(5h). This pattern holds regardless of whether the lateral immediately proceeds or immediately follows the [+back] or [–back] vowel. 10. We leave aside here discussion of whether the non-occurrence of suffix vowels that are {[–back] [+round]} is better stated in the specification of individual suffixes or in a general rule of Turkish phonology. 11. As one reviewer points out, laterals in word-initial position are almost never obligatorily velarized in Turkish (e.g. Demircan 1996). Thus [ɫaf] is in free variation with [laf] in certain varieties of Turkish. In fact, word-initial laterals will not be relevant for the present study.



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

Consider now the lexemes that end in a lateral in their uninflected forms. When a suffix with an underspecified vowel is added, this pattern is further enforced, as shown in the examples in (6). (6) a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h.

bal-a [baɫa] ‘honey.dat’ dark [ɫ] kul-a [kuɫa] ‘servant.dat’ dark [ɫ] kol-a [koɫa] ‘arm.dat’ dark [ɫ] kıl-a [kɨɫa] ‘hair.dat’ dark [ɫ] kül-e [kyle] ‘ash.dat’ light [l] il-e [ile] ‘city.dat’ light [l] göl-e [gøle] ‘lake. dat’ light [l] bel-e [bele] ‘back.dat’ light [l]

In the examples in (6), the dative suffix, which is underlyingly underspecified for the feature [±back] has been attached to nouns ending in a lateral. Canonical vowel harmony results in dark [ɫ] preceded and followed by a [+back] vowels in (6a)–(6d), and in light [l] preceded and followed by [–back] vowels in (6e)–(6h). The examples of Turkish laterals discussed thus far give the appearance of a standard example of allophones of a single phoneme in complementary distribution. They are representative of the vast majority of Turkish lexemes containing a lateral, and this distribution may be thought of as the canonical distribution of laterals in Turkish. There is, however, a class of exceptional cases. Due to borrowing from Arabic, Persian, and some European languages,12 there are instances of light [l] in the environment of [+back] vowels (Kabak 2011; Levi 2001). Some of the most common examples are listed in (7).13 (7) a. rol [rol] ‘role’ “light” [l] b. petrol [petrol] ‘petroleum’ “light” [l] c. hal [hal] ‘situation’ “light” [l]

12. Of course, from the perspective of Contemporary Turkish, the origin of these lexemes is merely an historical fact, not directly relevant to their synchronic representation. Furthermore, many English-Turkish classroom learners are not aware of the origins of the relevant Turkish lexemes, in any case. 13. Although most commonly observed with laterals, this phenomenon targets a larger inventory of consonants than just laterals, most notably alveolar and velar stops, as in [saat] – [saat-i] and [dikkat] – [dikkat-i]. We keep the focus of this paper restricted to laterals for experimental feasibility. We refer the reader to Clements & Sezer (1982) and Kabak (2011) for a more detailed coverage of these cases.

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Examples like (7) suggest that in some instances, Turkish laterals are in fact underlyingly specified for a feature like [Coronal].14 We may think of this phenomenon as the non-canonical distribution of /l/. When a suffix with a vowel that is underlyingly underspecified for the feature [±back] is attached, the suffix vowel surfaces as [–back], as illustrated in (8). (8) a. rol-e [role] ‘role.dat’ “light” [l] [–back] V b. petrol-e [petrole] ‘petrolium.dat’ “light” [l] [–back] V c. hal-e [hale] ‘situation.dat’ “light” [l] [–back] V

In the examples in (8), an underlyingly underspecified vowel is realized as a [–back] vowel, despite the presence of a [+back] vowel in the immediately preceding syllable. This obtains because of the intervening underlyingly specified [Coronal] lateral. We may say that the non-canonical distribution of /l/ leads to non-canonical vowel harmony in Turkish. Following Clements and Sezer (1982) (and in the spirit of Nevins 2010),15 we assume that examples of this kind indicate that in certain lexical items Turkish laterals are pre-specified for the feature [–back] and that locality conditions on feature spreading dictate that this feature specification spreads rightward to the vowels that follow. In the presence of this pre-specified feature, general constraints on feature spreading block the spreading of the specification [+back] from the root vowel to the suffix vowel. Hence, the forms in (9) (compare with (8) above) are not possible: (9) a. *rol-a [rola] ‘role.dat’ “light” [l] [+back] V b. *petrol-a [petrola] ‘petroleum.dat’ “light” [l] [+back] V c. *hal-a [hala] ‘situation.dat’ “light” [l] [+back] V

This phenomenon is illustrated in a condensed Feature Geometric representation in (10) below (see Levi 2001 for a similar approach):

14. There are a few (but very few) examples of near-minimal pairs. A good example for a near-­ minimal pair is [koɫ] “arm” vs. [gol] “goal.” In some dialects, as “arm” is [goɫ], these are minimal pairs. 15. Recently, Kabak (2011) has challenged the standard analysis assumed here. Kabak (2011) claims that all the relevant vowels in Turkish have full underlying specifications and that vowel harmony is the result of feature-changing rules. However, the autosegmental “spreading” analysis we employ here continues to receive support in modern phonological analyses of vowel harmony (see a review by Hyman 2014). It would go beyond the natural limits of this paper to offer a detailed critical discussion of this recent debate, particularly because it is not obvious that the plausible differences between the two approaches would materially affect the outcome of the L2 acquisitional question under investigation here.



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

(10)

r

o

l

e

C-place

C-place

C-place

C-place

V-place

V-place

V-place

Dorsal

Coronal

Normally, we would expect [±back] (Dorsal vs. Coronal for [+back] and [–back], respectively) to spread from one vowel to another (i.e. from [o] in this example). This is because, in general, only vowels have the node Vowel-place (V-place), where spreading of vowel features occurs, ensuring that vowel harmony satisfies locality despite intervening consonants. In this case, however, we assume, as with Levi (2001) and in the sense of Clements and Hume (1995), that the lateral has a V-place, pre-specified with Coronal (i.e. [–back]). This means that the final vowel, which is underspecified for [±back], will obtain this feature from the nearest feature-bearing element with the same node (i.e. the lateral).16 In other words, even though the vowel feature [±back] normally spreads through vowels, and also consonants are transparent to this (vowel harmony) process (as only vowels have the V-Place node), the lateral consonant here is special in that it is underlyingly specified for the spreading feature (as [–back]). This means that spreading from the vowel is blocked, and further spreading occurs from this consonant. Such blocking effects are common in Feature Geometry; whenever a segment is underlyingly specified for a value of the spreading feature, blocking occurs, and spreading (re)starts from this underlyingly specified segment (see Clements 1985; Clements & Hume 1995). It is precisely in examples of this type where Turkish orthography presents the L2er with potentially misleading input. This is because the Turkish writing system does not mark the unpredictable (hence, necessarily pre-specified) [–back] feature (Coronal) for the lateral in words like rol. To put it another way, the phonemic status of /l/ in examples like this one is not reflected in Turkish orthography, although Turkish orthography is otherwise a prime example of a phonemic

16. What makes these cases formally different from the cases involving the regular /l/ is that the regular /l/ is not prespecified for the Coronal node. Therefore, it appears as [+back] following a [+back] vowel, and [–back] following a [–back] vowel, inheriting these features from the preceding vowel through spreading. Thus if the lateral in this example were not prespecified for [–back]/Coronal, the features of the preceding vowel would spread both to the lateral and to the following vowel.

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script.17 Auditory input alone ([rol]) calls for [–back] vowels when suffixes with under-­specified vowels are added; orthographic input alone () strongly suggests [+back] vowels. Similar examples exist for other consonants, such as for the palatalized velar plosive /c/ as well, although we will not discuss these in this paper (see Note 5 above). The English-speaking learner of Turkish will find little assistance here from his or her L1 phonological and orthographic systems. The Turkish vowel system contrasts sharply with that of English, which exhibits neither vowel harmony nor three of the eight vowel phonemes of Turkish (i.e. /y/, /ø/, /ɨ/).18 It tends to exhibit /ə/ in most suffixes. Furthermore, English suffixes, unlike those in Turkish, tend to be unstressed, as final syllables are extrametrical in English, and the language is trochaic (Hayes 1995). Moreover, although the English lateral phoneme has at least four allophones (Fromkin et al. 2000: 524–525) (including the two that Turkish has), exemplified in (11), their distribution is dissimilar to that of the laterals in Turkish.19 (11) a. [ɫ] in syllable-final position file [faɪ̯ɫ] b. [ɫ̪] immediately preceding [θ] wealth [wɛɫ̪θ] c. [l̥͡l] immediately following [–voice] please [pʰl̥͡liz] d. [l] elsewhere loose [lu:s]  (based on Fromkin et al. 2000: 525)

17. It should be noted that as one reviewer has mentioned, Turkish once had a means for indicating irregularity in some cases, by using a circumflex on a (back) vowel grapheme adjacent to a non-canonically “light” /l/, as in the example for [hayal] ‘imagination’. This has never been an unambiguous orthographic diacritic, because it is also used for other purposes, such as lengthening of a marked vowel. Furthermore, this use has always been restricted to (some) borrowed words from Arabic and Persian, and was never used for words borrowed from Western languages, such as and . Although the use of the circumflex for vowels adjacent to non-canonical “light” /l/ in certain words is still maintained by some Turkish speakers, it is clearly on the decline in contemporary written Turkish, and typical classroom learners of Turkish receive extremely little (however useful it might be) instruction on this point today. 18. This is not to deny that some varieties of English may include one or more of these sounds as allophones of one or more of its phonemes. The point here is that English orthography is not designed to represent these sounds either phonemically or phonetically. 19. Turkish arguably has additional lateral allomorphy, as described in detail in Demircan (1996). We will not cover these cases. What is crucial here is the fact that dark- and light-l have a different distribution in the two languages.



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

In English, whether a lateral is velarized depends on its position within the syllable, not on the backness of adjacent vowels (e.g. Yuan & Liberman 2009, 2011).20 In essence, Turkish orthography reinforces the auditory input for canonical vowel harmony and provides neither facilitation nor obfuscation for the canonical distribution of /l/. However, given the general pattern of the canonical distribution of /l/, where the phonetic realization of /l/ is linked to adjacent vowels, Turkish orthography obfuscates the non-canonical distribution of /l/. English-speaking classroom learners of Turkish receive extensive instruction on canonical vowel harmony and may receive some instruction on the canonical distribution of /l/, but they receive no systematic instruction on the non-canonical distribution of /l/ and absolutely no instruction on non-canonical vowel harmony. Furthermore, while the English sound system includes both dark [ɫ] and light [l] as allophonic variants, their distribution is governed by their position within the syllable, not by the specification of the feature [±back] of an adjacent vowel. Therefore, the phonetic interpretation of the English grapheme is at best uninformative and at worst misleading for the English-speaking learner of Turkish. Taking all these factors into account, it should hardly be a surprise if early English-Turkish L2ers do not immediately exhibit knowledge of non-canonical vowel harmony. However, the Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis predicts that intermediate and advanced English-Turkish L2ers will come to rely less on “misleading” orthographic stimuli and increasingly on auditory input in their computation of vowel harmony. The Increasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis, on the other hand, predicts that as L2ers advance in their acquisition of Turkish, the effect of “misleading” orthographic stimuli will not diminish. 4. Methodology In this section, we describe an experiment designed to test the predictions of the Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis and the Increasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis. We aim to investigate aspects of unconscious knowledge of vowel harmony in English-speaking learners of Turkish at three different proficiency levels. Participants were asked to select vowel-harmonically correct suffixes on the basis of simultaneous auditory and orthographic stimuli as well as on the basis of auditory stimuli alone. 20. As one reviewer has suggested, some varieties of American English may only have dark-l (e.g. Oxley, Buckingham, Roussel, Daniloff 2006; Sproat & Fujimura 1993). Nevertheless, these varieties are still different from Turkish because they do not have light-l to begin with, placing an even greater burden on the English-speaking learner of Turkish.

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4.1

Participants

Participants were 16 adult English-speaking L2 learners of Turkish, as well as a comparison group of 8 native Turkish speakers. The L2ers were all students at a major US university and they had a mean age of 25 (range 19–36). The mean age of native Turkish speakers was 30 (range 28–33). L2ers’ knowledge of Turkish was based on formal Turkish instruction, ranging from 6 months to 4 years, as well as naturalistic L2 Turkish exposure through study abroad in Turkey (for 1 month to 2 years), and through Turkish-speaking partners, friends, or relatives. In total, 8 out of 16 participants had some type of regular naturalistic input in Turkish, in addition to the classroom input (naturalistic or formal) from native speaker teachers and teaching assistants. In order to obtain an independent measure of proficiency level in Turkish, the participants were also asked to complete a proficiency test. In the absence of a commonly available standardized L2 proficiency test for Turkish, we employed a multiple-choice cloze test to determine the L2ers’ general proficiency levels. The cloze test was previously used in Montrul (1997) and Özçelik (2011) to categorize learners of Turkish into different proficiency groups. As in Özçelik (2011), a multiple-choice version of the cloze test was used in the current study. On the basis of the cloze test, participants were divided into three proficiency levels: beginner (n = 6), intermediate (n = 5), and advanced (n = 5). These proficiency levels more or less matched with participants’ self-­reported proficiency levels and the Turkish-language classes they were placed in at the university. 4.2

Task and stimuli

In the experimental task, participants were presented with a Turkish word or pseudoword (i.e. the root), and asked to choose the correct variant of a suffix, from among two or four options depending on whether the suffix was subject to two-­way or four-way vowel harmony (see the discussion under (4) in Section 3). Although the term ‘vowel harmony’ was not mentioned in the instructions, the choices for any particular item were in fact allomorphs of a given suffix. The allomorphy involved was based solely on vowel harmony (and not, for example, on consonantal voicing assimilation). For example, for a given word like [ev] ‘home’, participants were presented with the options (a) ‘-de’ and (b) ‘-da’, and not ‘-te’ or ‘-ta’; the latter two are also allomorphs of the same locative morpheme, but are attached after words ending in voiceless consonants. The task consisted of 256 semi-randomized items, half of which (i.e. 128) were experimental items (i.e. ending in a lateral) and the other half, fillers (i.e. ending in a variety of consonants other than a lateral). All items were presented on a computer screen. Both real



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

Turkish words and pseudowords were used as experimental items, with approximately equal numbers (more on this below). All of the words were nouns and all the suffixes were inflectional suffixes that attach to nouns (see below). As real words of the relevant profile were very few, almost all existing such words we were able to think of were used, irrespective of frequency of use in Turkish. Half of the experimental items (i.e. 64) and half of the filler items (i.e. 64) were presented auditorily only. In this condition, participants, upon hearing a stimulus item, chose the correct suffix to be attached from among those presented on a computer screen by clicking on the correct option. The other half of experimental and filler items (i.e. 64 in each) were presented both auditorily and visually. For these items, participants were instructed to both read and listen to the stimuli before choosing the correct option. Regarding the suffixes that were used, half of the items (i.e. 128 items composed of 64 experimental and 64 filler items) tested suffixes that have an underlying high vowel (see (3) above), whereas the other 128 items (64 experimental; 64 control) targeted suffixes with an underlying low vowel (see (4)). In particular, the following suffixes were used: (12) Suffixes used: a. Suffixes with an underlying high vowel (128 in total; 64 experimental, 64 filler): i. {/-im/, /-üm/, /-ım/, /-um/} ‘first person possessive’ ii. {/-siz/, /-süz/, /-sız/, /-suz/} ‘without’ b. Suffixes with an underlying low vowel (128 in total; 64 experimental, 64 filler): i. {/-ler/, /-lar/} ‘plural’ ii. {/-de/, /-da} ‘locative’

The suffixes in (12a) correspond to the so-called four-way vowel harmony (see (3) for an illustration), while those in (12b) correspond to two-way vowel harmony (see (4)). Recall that the suffixes with inherent high vowels exhibit both back and rounding harmony, resulting in four different options, while the suffixes with underlying/inherent low vowels exhibit only back harmony, resulting in two possible options. So half of the items in our test had 4 choices, whereas the other half had only 2, depending on whether a given item tested four-way or two-way vowel harmony. The quality of the final vowel in every test item was controlled for. This allowed us to test every logically possible combination of stem vowel + suffix vowel. This is illustrated in Figure 1. For example, the sequences ü-ü and ö-ü under ü in Figure 1 means that the suffix vowel is expected to be ü, following a word whose final vowel is ü and following a word whose final vowel is ö, respectively, as in

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66 Öner Özçelik and Rex A. Sprouse

Stimuli

High

ı

ı-ı

i

a-ı i-i

Low

u

e-i

u-u

ü

o-u ü-ü

a

ö-ü a-a

ı-a

e

u-a

o-a

e-e

i-e

ü-e

ö-e

Figure 1.  Expected stem+suffix vowel sequences in stimuli

kül-üm and çöl-üm. There were 16 stimuli in each of the 16 conditions (e.g. i-i, o-u, ö-ü) presented in Figure 1. Out of these 16 stimuli, 8 were experimental (words that ended in /l/) and 8 were fillers. Again, half of these were presented auditorily only and half both auditorily and visually. Note, however, that the sequence of vowels illustrated under each class in Figure 1 is more representative of fillers than of experimental items. More specifically, in the experimental item set, a word whose final vowel is a [+back] vowel will not necessarily be followed by a suffix that contains a [+back] vowel because /l/ will have an effect on the quality of the following vowel, at least in cases where it is underlyingly specified as Coronal (or [–back]) as in the example of /rol-e/ (but not */rol-a/) (see examples (7) to (9)). Consequently, it will surface, in these cases, as an o-e sequence, instead of o-a. Thus, the tokens represented in Figure 1 are more representative of the distribution of vowel sequences expected under the regular rules of Turkish vowel harmony and do not necessarily reflect output forms as affected by the presence of consonants that lead to exceptional cases of vowel harmony. What matters here is that every possible sequence of vowels has been symmetrically represented among the stimuli selected for the study. Half of the experimental items in each condition (i.e. 4 out of 8) had a non-­ contrasting /l/, which means that the /l/ surfaced as a light (non-velarized) [l] in the environment of front vowels and a dark (velarized) [ɫ] in the environment of back vowels (e.g. [bel] ‘back’ vs. [baɫ] ‘honey’ as in (6)). For the other half, the quality of the lateral was underlyingly specified, as with the forms in (7), such as [rol] ‘role’, where a light-l appears in the environment of back vowels. Because of this, back harmony is affected by the presence of this [l] in that the vowel of the following suffix needs to be front, not back, even though the last vowel in this word is a back vowel (e.g. [rol-de] and not *[rol-da]). In addition to these forms which have a lateral underlyingly specified as [–back], we also created stimuli that were the mirror image of these cases, words with a lateral underlyingly specified



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

for [+back] (i.e. cases leading to a dark [ɫ] on the surface immediately following a front vowel as in [töɫ] and [reɫ]) even though this particular pattern does not occur in Turkish at all.21 The focus of this paper is on the former type of underlyingly specified laterals, i.e. those that actually occur in Turkish. In sum, whereas half of the experimental items (i.e. 64) had a non-contrasting /l/ (not pre-specified for [±back]), the other half had a contrasting /l/ (i.e. pre-specified for [±back]). Out of 64 items pre-specified for [±back], 32 were pre-specified for (i.e. underlyingly had) a light /l/, and the other 32 were pre-specified for a dark /ɫ/, a form that does not exist in Turkish. These were equally distributed in two different presentation modalities. As mentioned earlier, the main focus of this investigation is cases consisting of an underlying light /l/. As was mentioned above, in addition to the 128 test stimuli containing words ending in variations of /l/, there were 128 fillers, which ended in a variety of Turkish consonants. The fillers, unlike the experimental stimuli, did not contain consonants affecting vowel harmony or any other type of exceptionality. They served a number of purposes. For example, they helped us ascertain if participants knew several linguistic phenomena involved in the experimental stimuli, such as vowel harmony rules particularly those involving backness and rounding harmony. Perhaps more importantly, they also ensured that the number of words ending in [l] and [ɫ] vs. other consonants was somewhat balanced, helping us avoid a situation where all test stimuli ended in a lateral. Participants were tested individually (on a computer screen, using the Powerpoint software). The order of testing was as follows: (i) a language background questionnaire, (ii) vowel harmony task, and (iii) cloze test. Responses were recorded and subsequently downloaded into Excel for analysis. For all the results reported, we conducted a two-way ANOVA, followed by a post hoc test, i.e. a Tukey HSD test. 5. Results We took the rate of participants’ correct suffix choices as our dependent variable. Our independent variables were (i) modality of presentation (i.e. whether the stimulus was presented auditorily only or both auditorily and visually); (ii) proficiency level. Table 1 summarizes these results in terms of percentage of correct

21. These items were added in order to test whether learners (and native speakers) would attach a suffix with a back vowel after a lateral underlyingly specified as [+back], mirroring what happens with forms like [rol-de], where a suffix with a front vowel is attached after a word whose final vowel is [+back],due to the underlyingly specified front (palatal) /l/.

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Table 1.  Results: Percentage of correct suffix choices Beginner (n = 6)

Intermediate (n = 5)

Advanced (n = 5)

Native (n = 8)

Back V + light /l/ Auditory only Auditory + visual

44.17  2.50

55.00 21.00

55.00 32.00

81.88 73.18

Regular /l/ Auditory only Auditory + visual

77.09 96.67

90.63 98.40

96.25 99.20

99.61 99.50

Fillers Auditory only Auditory + visual

84.11 98.43

93.75 99.06

96.56 95.90

98.83 98.04

responses, for (i) stimuli ending in laterals underlyingly specified as Coronal (see row 1); (ii) for laterals that are underlyingly unspecified and thus appearing as light-l in the environment of front vowels, and dark-ɫ in the environment of back vowels (row 2); (iii) fillers, which end in consonants other than a lateral (row 3). The results revealed that with respect to words ending in a palatal [l] after a back vowel (as in [rol]), being exposed to stimuli only auditorily lead to a higher percentage of correct responses than being exposed to stimuli both auditorily and visually. In other words, the ‘modality of presentation’ mattered. All learner groups, irrespective of their level of proficiency did better in the ‘Auditory only’ condition than in the ‘Auditory+visual’ condition. The results of a two-way ANOVA showed that these differences were statistically significant, F(1, 26) = 11.024, p  .05. Furthermore, the interaction between ‘modality of presentation’ and ‘proficiency’ was not significant, either, F(2, 26) = .306, p > .05. In contrast, for all other experimental stimuli (row 2) and for the fillers (row 3), presenting stimuli visually and auditorily increased the percentage of correct responses. First of all, for stimuli ending in a regular /l/, a Two-Factor Analysis of Variance showed a significant main effect for the modality of presentation, F(1, 26) = 55.884, p < .001 and, unlike the test items, a significant main effect for ‘proficiency’ level, F(2, 26) = 23.878, p < .001. Furthermore, the interaction between ‘modality of presentation’ and ‘proficiency’ was also significant, F(2, 26) = 14.078, p < .001. In addition, the results of a Tukey HSD test showed that the significant effect of ‘proficiency’ was due to a difference between the ‘beginner’ and ‘advanced’ groups (p < .01), and that there was no significant difference either between ‘beginner and intermediate’ or ‘intermediate and advanced’ groups (p > 0.5).



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

Finally, for the fillers, as with the cases with regular (non-contrasting) /l/, the ‘modality of presentation’ made a difference; stimuli presented both auditorily and visually lead to higher accuracy rates than stimuli presented auditorily only. Accordingly, the results of a Two-Factor Analysis of Variance demonstrated a significant main effect for ‘modality of presentation’, F(1, 26) = 17.712, p < .001; and a significant main effect for ‘proficiency’, F(2, 26) = 5.328, p = .012. The interaction between ‘modality of presentation’ and ‘proficiency’ was also significant, F(2, 26) = 8.771, p < .001. Furthermore, the results of a Tukey HSD test showed that the significant effect of ‘proficiency’ was due to the fact that the beginner group diverged from both the intermediate and advanced groups (p < .05). There was no significant difference between the intermediate and advanced groups (p > 0.5). This suggests that for regular cases of vowel harmony, the proficiency level mattered only to the extent that it distinguished beginners from intermediate learners. At higher proficiency levels (i.e. intermediate and advanced) learners behaved similarly. The contrast in Table 1 between row 1 on one hand and rows 2 and 3 on the other is rather striking: bimodal (visual and auditory) presentation of stimuli negatively influences participants’ correct responses in cases where a palatal (light) [l] immediately follows a back vowel (where orthography is opaque). This type of presentation positively influences participants’ correct responses in the two other types of stimuli (i.e. cases with regular /l/, where the underlying place of /l/ is not specified, and fillers, where word-final vowels only determine the quality of the suffix vowel). It should be noted, however, that in cases with regular /l/ and fillers (forms with regular vowel harmony), none of the participants (except for some beginners) had any difficulty. This suggests that vowel harmony itself (regular harmony) is not difficult for learners of Turkish, irrespective of level of proficiency and regardless of whether it involves backness harmony or rounding harmony. 6. Discussion and conclusion The results of the experiment indicate that the modality of stimulus presentation was a very significant factor in determining participants’ accuracy rates. Compared to auditory presentation alone, bimodal presentation has led to a higher rate of correct responses in providing the vowel harmonic version of suffixes in cases involving ‘regular’ vowel harmony (cases that we termed as ‘fillers’). However, in cases involving exceptional vowel harmony (i.e. cases that involve a “light” /l/ immediately following a back vowel), the bimodal stimulus presentation has led to a lower rate of response accuracy. The proficiency level played a significant role

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in cases with regular vowel harmony, with advanced learners performing significantly better than intermediate and beginner learners of Turkish. As development unfolds, our English-Turkish L2ers came to rely less on potentially misleading orthographic stimuli, performing at a significantly higher rate of accuracy, even when potentially misleading orthographic presentation was included in the stimulus. The basic outline of development reported here suggests an important but circumscribed role for orthography in the phonological development of instructed learners acquiring a language such as Turkish. It would appear that the (many) aspects of Turkish orthography that more or less transparently encode the phonological system of Turkish (of course, paired with abundant auditory input) can be highly facilitative of phonological acquisition, particularly in early stages of acquisition. However, the less transparent or even obfuscating aspect of the orthographic system (which in our case is relevant for relatively low-frequency phenomena) can (partially) inhibit such acquisition in early learners. Nevertheless, with increased exposure to auditory input, L2ers seem to be able to overcome the obfuscating aspects of TL orthography and rely more on auditory input, providing evidence for the Decreasing Dependence on Orthography Hypothesis. In our case study, this is particularly striking, in light of the relatively low frequency of Turkish lexemes exhibiting non-canonical distribution of /l/ and hence non-­ canonical vowel harmony to which learners will be exposed. Particularly intriguing is the result that this cannot have been a simple result of learning specific lexemes of this sort, because learners applied their mentally represented rules of vowel harmony equally to both real Turkish words and nonce words. The early introduction of literacy development in the L2 acquisition of Turkish appears to yield a highly facilitative effect for the vast majority of lexemes exhibiting canonical distribution of /l/ and canonical vowel harmony. If one accepts the premise that it is acceptable for L2ers to make occasional vowel harmony errors in a small class of items at early stages of acquisition, as long as they will be able to recover from those errors in intermediate and advanced stages of acquisition, these results suggest that the current practice of developing oracy and literacy skills in tandem may in fact be helpful in the long term. At the same time, we would encourage as much auditory input as possible, given that this is crucial for the development of target-like computation of the full range of vowel harmony rules in Turkish. We also encourage Turkish language teachers to be aware of the non-canonical distribution of /l/ and the associated non-canonical vowel harmony patterns so that they can provide a demystifying explanation to linguistically astute learners who notice these exceptional forms and inquire about them.



Chapter 2.  Vowel harmony in English-Turkish interlanguage

References Bassetti, B. 2009. Orthographic input and second language phonology. In Input Matters in SLA, T. Piske, P. Thorsten & M. Young-Scholten (eds), 191–206. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bley-Vroman, R. 1990. The logical problem of foreign language learning. Linguistic Analysis 20: 3–48. Clements, G. N. 1985. The geometry of phonological features. Phonology Yearbook 2: 225–252.  doi:  10.1017/S0952675700000440

Clements, G. N. & Hume, E. V. 1995. In The Internal Organization of Speech Sounds, J. A. Goldsmith (ed), 245–306. Cambridge: Blackwell. Clements, G. N. & Sezer, E. 1982. Vowel and consonant disharmony in Turkish. In The Structure of Phonological Representations, H. van der Hults & N. Smith (eds), 213–255. Dor­ drecht: Foris. Demircan, Ö. 1996. Türkçenin Sesdizimi. Istanbul: Der Yayınevi. Erdener, V. D. & Burnham, D. K. 2005. The role of audiovisual speech and orthographic information in nonnative speech production. Language Learning 55: 191–228.  doi:  10.1111/j.0023-8333.2005.00303.x

Escudero, P. & Wanrooij, K. 2010. The effect of L1 orthography on non-native vowel perception. Language and Speech 53: 343–365. doi: 10.1177/0023830910371447 Felix, S. 1985. More evidence on competing cognitive systems. Second Language Research 1: 47–92. doi: 10.1177/026765838500100104 Fromkin, V., Hayes, B., Curtiss, S., Szabolcsi, A., Stowell, T., Stabler, E., Sportiche, D., Koopman, H., Keating, P., Munro, P., Hyams, N. & Steriade, D. 2000. Linguistics: An Introduction to Linguistic Theory. Malden MA: Blackwell. Hayes, B. 1995. Metrical Stress Theory: Principles and Case Studies. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Hayes-Harb, R., Nicol, J. & Barker, J. 2010. Learning the phonological forms of new words: Effects of orthographic and auditory input. Language and Speech 53: 367–381.  doi:  10.1177/0023830910371460

Hyman, L. M. 2014. How autosegmental is phonology? The Linguistic Review 31: 363–400.  doi:  10.1515/tlr-2014-0004

Kabak, B. 2011. Turkish vowel harmony. In The Blackwell Companion to Phonology, M. van Oostendorp, C. J. Ewen, E. Hume & K. Rice (eds), 2831–2854. Dordrecht: Foris. Kornfilt, J. 1997. Turkish. London: Routledge. Krashen, S. D. 1981. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Oxford: Pergamon Press. Levi, S. V. 2001. Glides, laterals and Turkish vowel harmony. Papers from the Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society 37: 379–393. Montrul, S. 1997. Transitivity Alternations in Second Language Acquisition: A Crosslinguistic Study of English, Spanish and Turkish. PhD dissertation, McGill University. Nevins, A. 2010. Locality in Vowel Harmony [Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 55]. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. doi: 10.7551/mitpress/9780262140973.001.0001 Oxley, J., Buckingham, H., Roussel, N. & Daniloff, R. 2006. Metrical/syllabic factors in English allophony: Dark /l/. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 20: 109–117.  doi:  10.1080/02699200400026512

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Özçelik, Ö. 2011. Representation and Acquisition of Stress: The Case of Turkish. PhD dissertation, McGill University. Schwartz, B. D. & Sprouse, R. A. 1996. L2 cognitive states and the Full Transfer/Full Access model. Second Language Research 12: 40–72. doi: 10.1177/026765839601200103 Sproat, R. & Fujimura, O. 1993. Allophonic variation in English /l/ and its implications for phonetic implementation. Journal of Phonetics 21: 291–311. Tsimpli, I. M. & Dimitrakopoulou, M. 2007. The interpretability hypothesis: Evidence from wh-interrogatives in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 23: 215–242.  doi:  10.1177/0267658307076546

Underhill, R. 1976. Turkish Grammar. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press. Yuan, J. & Liberman, M. 2009. Investigating /l/ variation in English through forced alignment. In Proceedings of Interspeech 2009: 2215–2218. Yuan, J. & Liberman, M. 2011. ‘/l/ variation in American English: A corpus approach’. Journal of Speech Sciences 1: 35–46.

PART II

The acquisition of L2 morpho-syntax

Chapter 3

The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish Evidence from Greek learners Hasan Kaili, Aytaç Çeltek and Despina Papadopoulou Ankara University / Kırıkkale University / Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

The acquisition of tense, aspect and modality (TAM) poses a major acquisition problem for adult second language (L2) learners. Early interlanguages are reported to be impoverished with respect to the use of TAM markers. In this paper, we investigate the acquisition and the use of TAM morphemes -(I)yor, -A/Ir, -(y)AcAK, -DI and -mIş by providing empirical data from the interlanguage of adult Greek learners of Turkish. More specifically, the purpose of the present study is to identify the most problematic morphology within TAM and to account for the results on the basis of the inherent functional characteristics of the relevant morphology in Turkish as well as first language (L1) Greek influence. Keywords: TAM markers, Turkish as a second language, Modern Greek

1. Introduction The expression of temporality is one of the major theoretical domains in language. Different languages depend on different resources for temporal references, but they all have the ways to express common basic concepts about time, i.e. tense and aspect. As a result, L2 acquisition of tense and aspect systems has been the focus of many descriptive and instructional explanations of language and has always occupied a significant place in the curricula of many language programs (Bardovi-Harlig 2013). There are several theoretical approaches to the analysis of tense and aspect development in second language (L2) acquisition such as the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen 1991; Andersen & Shirai 1994; Shirai & Andersen 1995), the Prototype Theory (Rosch 1973; Shirai & Andersen 1995), and the Primacy of Aspect doi 10.1075/lald.59.04kai © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai 1996). These theoretical frameworks propose a general pattern of acquisition sequence for tense and aspect systems. The Aspect Hypothesis asserts that the learner’s choice of verbal morphology is related to the inherent lexical semantics of the verb phrase (Andersen & Shirai 1994). Besides, the hypothesis makes predictions about the distribution and direction of tense and aspect markings (i.e. past with achievements, present with states, and progressive with activities). The present study focuses on the most problematic aspects within tense, aspect and modality (TAM) morphology and attempts to explain the findings on the basis of the inherent functional characteristics of the relevant morphology in Turkish. The influence of first language (L1) Greek is also considered in interpreting the findings. Since TAM markers are encoded in different ways cross-­ linguistically, the learning task of the L2 learner is considerably complicated due to language-specific properties. This study is an extension of an ongoing project on the acquisition of Turkish temporal and aspectual properties by Greek speakers. In Kaili and Çeltek (2011), it is argued that Greek-speaking learners of Turkish experience difficulties in correctly interpreting the different uses of the aorist marker, -(A/I)r in their early interlanguage. These difficulties were attributed, on one hand, to the semantics of the -(A/I)r form in general, and to the lack of an equivalent verbal form in Greek on the other. Furthermore, in Kaili and Çeltek (2012), the past tense and perfective aspect suffixes -DI and -mIş were compared in order to explore which morpheme and which particular meaning is more challenging for L1 Greek learners. Kaili and Çeltek (2012) indicated that Greek-speaking learners of Turkish confuse particular uses of -DI and -mIş and have difficulty in perceiving certain uses of -mIş. Both of these studies were conducted with beginner and intermediate-level learners, who were exposed to Turkish only in the classroom context. In order to see whether the results of these two studies are also valid for advanced learners, who are exposed to Turkish in and outside of the classroom context, we extended the scope of the experimental tasks bringing the verbal suffixes -DI, -(y)AcAK , -(I)yor, -(A/I)r and -mIş together. In the present study, language-­ specific factors – both L1-related and L2-related factors – will be addressed as potential sources of difficulty for Greek-speaking learners of Turkish. In this study, L2-related factors will be addressed as complex semantic characterization of TAM in Turkish, where tense, aspectual, and even modal functions are merged in a single form. As Temürcü (2007: 8) notes “particular markers in particular languages are associated with one or more distinctive semantic functions”. Temürcü calls these semantic functions as “uses” of a marker. In the current study, the one-tomany mapping between markers and their uses is referred to as multifunctionality. As it will be explained in detail in the following sections, the multifunctionality



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

feature of TAM markers in Turkish (e.g. -(A/I)r or -mIş) does not always have an equivalent realization in Greek. In other words, different uses of one multifunctional marker may have more than one equivalent in Greek, either as a single form or a construction. Therefore, the lack of equivalence of TAM expressions in these two languages is believed to produce L1-related difficulty in the acquisition of these Turkish markers by Greek-speaking learners. In the current study, it is predicted that the Greek-speaking learners’ perceptions of the uses of Turkish TAM markers will be affected by the multifunctionality of these markers as well as the properties of TAM markers in the learners’ L1. The remaining of the paper is structured as follows. A brief discussion of previous work on L2 acquisition of TAM markers is presented in Section 2. Section 3 summarizes the meanings and uses of the relevant Turkish suffixes, namely, -(I)yor, -(A/I)r, -(y)AcAK, -DI and -mIş. In addition, a short description of the way Greek expresses TAM will be provided in order to shed light on the differences between the two languages. The method employed in the current study as well the results are detailed in Section 4. The paper concludes in Section 5 with a discussion of the major findings of the study and their implications. 2. L2 acquisition of TAM markers Previous studies on the acquisition of TAM markers in an L2 generally suggest that morphological markers of modality are acquired later than tense and aspectual markers (Giacalone Ramat 1992; Howard 2008). For example, Giacalone Ramat (1992) found that English- and German-speaking learners of Italian prefer to express modality lexically rather than by means of subjunctive or conditional. Dittmar and Terborg (1991) drew similar conclusions regarding modality in Polish learners of German. Difficulties with respect to the modal uses of the subjunctive are attested in English learners of Spanish (Terrell, Baycroft & Perrone 1987) as well as in English- and Swedish-speaking learners of French even at advanced levels of proficiency (Bartning 2003; Harley 1992; Howard 2008). In a corpus-based study, Efstathiadi (2010) found that advanced speakers of Greek with various L1s use lexical means more frequently than grammatical means to denote epistemic modality, compared to native speaker controls. Although there is no single comprehensive work on L2 acquisition of Turkish TAM, TAM markers have been examined in numerous studies either separately or all together for different purposes (Aksu-Koç 1988; Erguvanlı-Taylan 1996, 1997, 2001; Erguvanlı-Taylan & Özsoy 1993; Güven 2006; Temürcü 2007; Yavaş 1980 among many others). Aksu-Koç (1988: 101), who has studied the L1 acquisition of Turkish TAM markers notes “… in languages where both tense and aspect are

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distinctly grammaticalized, the differentiation of closely related semantic functions is realized earlier in the child’s speech, while in languages like Turkish, where tense, aspectual, and even modal functions are fused in a single form, it may be a more gradual process”. Erguvanlı-Taylan (2001: 97) also makes a similar observation by stating that TAM-markers in Turkish do not always have a differentiated function, and that a certain verb inflection may express tense/aspect and/ or mood simultaneously. Furthermore, she notes that the analysis of the Turkish verbal coding system is an intricate matter because of the fact that such different semantic categories may be subsumed under a single morpheme. In Erguvanlı-­ Taylan (2001) and Güven (2006), it is claimed that the multifunctionality of TAM morphemes in Turkish is compensated by adverbs and/or particles that specify or disambiguate the temporal, aspectual, and modal distinctions. Based on these previous observations and analyses, the current study aims to identify potential difficulties experienced by L1 Greek learners of Turkish in the acquisition of TAM markers. As stated in Erguvanlı-Taylan (2001), the semantic characterization of TAM markers needs to be explicitly defined and their distinct properties need to be determined in order to be able to investigate the kinds of parametric variations exemplified in different languages. The following section discusses cross-­linguistic differences between Turkish and Greek with respect to the semantic characterization of TAM markers. 3. Tense, aspect and modality in Turkish and Greek In this section we will provide a short description of the way TAM is represented in Turkish and Greek. Our presentation will focus on the uses tested in the two experimental tasks. 3.1

Turkish

Our discussion will focus on the uses of Turkish TAM markers, namely, -(I)yor, -(A/I)r, -(y)AcAK, -DI and –mIş. 3.1.1 -(I)yor This suffix is the characteristic marker of progressive aspect and present tense (in the strict sense of the grammatical marking of ‘location in time’) in Turkish. It is used mainly when events are viewed as incomplete or in progress.



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

(1) Ne yap-ıyor-sun? Ders çalış-ıyor-um what do-(I)yor-2sg lesson work-(I)yor-1sg1 ‘What are you doing? I am studying’

Like the aorist, -(I/A)r, -(I)yor is also used to denote habitual aspect. (2) Her sabah saat yedi-de uyan-ıyor-um Every morning o’clock seven-loc wake.up-(ι)yor-1sg ‘Every morning I wake up at 7 o’clock’

-(I)yor indicates the perfect of persistent situation in Comrie’s terms (1976: 60). In other words, it is used ‘to describe a situation that has started in the past, but persists into the present’. (3) Yedi yıl-dır bu ev-de yaş-ıyor-uz seven year-cop this house-loc live-(i)yor-1pl ‘We have been living in this house for seven years’

As Balcı (2000: 117–118) states, ‘-(I)yor marks iterativity when it is used with verbs which otherwise are semelfactive. For example, hapşırmak ‘to sneeze’ is semelfactive as in (4): (4) Hasan hapşır-dı Hasan sneeze-dι.3sg ‘Hasan sneezed’

However, if -DI is replaced by -(I)yor, the sentence will be interpreted as a series of repeated sneezing and not a single one: (5) Hasan hapşır-ıyor Hasan sneeze-(I)yor.3sg ‘Hasan sneezes (repeatedly)’

In the presence of certain time adverbials -(I)yor is also used with future reference to denote scheduled future events: (6) Yarın pikniğ-e gid-iyor-uz Tomorrow picnic-dat go-(ı)yor-1pl ‘Tomorrow we are going for a picnic’ 1. The following abbreviations are used in the text: ABL = ablative, ACC = accusative, CL = clitic, COP = copula, CVB = converb, DAT = dative, FUT = future, GEN = genitive, IMP = imperative, IMPF = imperfective, INS = instrumental, LOC = locative, NEG = negation, NONPST = non past, PASS = passive, PST = past, PF = perfective, PL = plural, POSS = possessive, POT = potentiality, PTCP = participle, SG = singular, SUBJ = subjunctive, VN = verbal noun.

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-(I)yor has also a past interpretation with verbs of communication to state that though the reported event has taken place in the past, it still speaks to us: (7) Televizyon-da öyle di-yor Television-loc so say-(ı)yor-3sg ‘TV says so’

Finally, as described in Balcı (2000: 118), -(I)yor is used in narratives, commentaries and demonstrations, as it provides immediacy and generates excitement and thus it increases the dramatic effect of the events narrated. 3.1.2 -(A/I)r The so-called Aorist (Geniş Zaman) -(A/I)r, is mainly used to mark imperfective (habitual) aspect or generic meaning both of which put emphasis on the characterization of an entity or of a class. Also, it is used to mark scientific/moral axioms and demonstrations. In terms of its time reference, -(A/I)r can be characterized as omnitemporal, i.e. its true value holds for all times (Yavaş 1980: 96). Besides its aspectual dimension, -(A/I)r also has many modal functions. As described in Kaili (2008) and Kaili & Çeltek (2011), these can be divided into two categories as epistemic or deontic modality, as suggested by Bybee, Perkins and Pagliuca (1994). The epistemic meanings of -(A/I)r include (a) the expression of possibility, when it is in the apodosis part of a conditional proposition, and (b) the expression of probability. In other contexts, -(A/I)r expresses inferred certainty, prediction or an assumption: (8) Şans-ın-ı dene. Müdür oda-sı-nda Chance-poss.2sg-acc try.imp.2sg manager office-poss.3sg-loc ol-ur şimdi be-(a/ı)r-3sg now ‘Take your chance. The manager would be in his office now’ (9) Osman balık sev-er, öyleyse çipura da yer Osman fish love-(a/ı)r-3sg then bream cl eat-(a/ı)r-3sg ‘Osman likes fish, then he would eat bream, too’

In sentences (8)–(9) -(A/I)r expresses epistemic modality rather than habitual aspect. In addition to these epistemic meanings, -(A/I)r also has various deontic meanings. It can denote the speaker’s prediction about his/her ability to accomplish something (Yavaş 1980: 105). Moreover, it can express desire, volition, willingness or a promise on the part of the speaker.



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

When -(A/I)r is used in the interrogative form it expresses offers, proposals, requests. Yet, the functions of -(A/I)r are not limited to these. Let us examine sentences (10)–(13): (10) Um-ar-ım sınav-dan yüksek not al-ır-sın hope-(a/ı)r-1sg exam-abl high grade take-(a/ı)r-2sg ‘Hopefully you will get high grades on the exam’ (11) Ders-ler-in-i bitir, arkadaş-lar-ın-la lesson-pl-poss.2sg-acc finish.ımp.2sg friend-pl-poss.2sg-ins oyna-r-sın play-(a/ı)r-2sg ‘Finish your homework and you will play with your friends’ (12) Hadi nazlan-ma. Sen bana bu iş-i Come.on act.coyly-neg.ımp.2sg you I.dat this work-acc yap-ar-sın do-(a/ı)r-2sg ‘Don’t act coyly. You would do this favor for me ’ (13) Bu hava-da dışarı çık-ıl-maz this weather-loc out go.out-pass-neg(a/ı)r.3sg ‘No one goes out in this weather’ (It is not advisable to go out in this weather)

We observe that in sentence (10) -(A/I)r expresses wish, in (11) permission, in (12) exhortation (the speaker is inciting the hearer to action) and in (13) admonition. What sentences (10)–(13) have in common is that they allow the speaker to impose the conditions of the fulfillment of the action on the addressee. They all belong to the category, which Bybee et al. (1994: 177) name “speaker-oriented modality” (Kaili & Çeltek 2011: 549). 3.1.3 -(y)AcAK With respect to future, -(y)AcAK is the only explicit marker of futurity among the verbal suffixes (Göksel & Keslake 2005: 329). As stated in Balcı (2000: 118), when combined with relevant adverbials, -(y)AcAK marks the prospective aspect in Turkish. As Comrie (1976: 64) observes, the prospective aspect links a present state to a subsequent situation. (14) Ödev-im-i hemen bitir-eceğ-im homework-poss.1sg-acc immediately finish-(y)acak-1sg ‘I will immediately finish my homework’

-(y)AcAK also has modal functions. It can be used to make assumptions based on prior knowledge about a situation:

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(15) On-u şimdi ara-ma. Toplantı-da ol-acak s/he-acc now call-neg.ımp.2sg meeting-loc be-(y)acak.3sg ‘Don’t call him now. He must be in a meeting’

-(y)AcAK provided with an appropriate context can also express admonition: (16) Oda-m-a bir daha asla gir-me-yecek-sin Room-poss.1sg-dat one time never get.to-neg-(y)acak-2sg ‘You will never get into my room again’

One should bear in mind that besides -(y)AcAK, both -(I)yor and -(A/I)r are also used to mark futurity. However, as Balcı (2000: 118–119) mentions, the three morphemes differ in some respects. Referring to Yavaş (1980: 84), she notes that “-(I)yor and -(y)AcAK are contrasted on the basis of whether or not the event is scheduled; and therefore, more definite. For non-scheduled, less definite events, the choice is between -(y)AcAK and -(A/I)r.” 3.1.4 -DI -DI expresses both past tense and perfective aspect. In other words, it denotes past events that are viewed as completed. It can also express perfect aspect when the emphasis in on the present result of a past situation. As indicated in Balcı (2000: 111), in many cases a sentence with a predicate in -DI may be ambiguous between the two aspectual meanings. The ambiguity is resolved by the context. (17) Bütün yemeğ-im-i ye-di-m (ve oyna-ma-ya git-ti-m) all food-poss.1sg-acc eat-dı-1sg (and play-vn-dat go-dı-1sg) ‘I ate all my food (and went to play)’ (18) Bütün yemeğ-im-i ye-di-m (ama hala aç-ım) all food-poss.1sg-acc eat-dı-1sg (but still hungry-cop-1sg) ‘I have eaten all my food (but I am still hungry)’

Given the appropriate adverbials, -DI also marks recent past (19) or experiential perfect (20) (Balcı 2000: 112). (19) Ayşe henüz ev-e dön-dü Ayşe just home-dat come.back-dı.3sg ‘Ayşe has just returned home’ (20) Amerika’-ya hiç git-me-di-m America-dat never go-neg-dı-1sg ‘I have never been to America’



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

In terms of its epistemic modality, -DI signals direct evidence on the part of the speaker about the actuality of the event. Nevertheless, -DI is also used in the narration of historical facts and news reports, even if they may not have been experienced by the speaker (Balcı 2000: 112). 3.1.5 -mIş The suffix, -mIş, like -DI, expresses both past tense and perfective aspect. The opposition in the meaning and use of -mIş and -DI is mostly traced back to the speaker’s report of direct versus indirect experience of the event described (Kaili & Çeltek 2012: 5). -mIş signals indirect evidence on the part of the speaker about the actuality of the event (or at least direct but non-visual in the sense of Plungian 2001): (21) Ahmet ödev-i-ni bitir-miş Ahmet homework-poss.3sg-acc finish-mış.3sg ‘Ahmet has finished his homework’ (22) (Upon feeling a rumbling in your stomach) Acık-mış-ım get.hungry-mış-1sg ‘I got hungry’

It is also used when the described event is inferred (irrespective of whether the inference is synchronous, retrospective or based on reasoning). The morpheme, -mIş is also used when referred to mediated evidence (both in the 2nd, 3rd hand, hearsay or a question) (see Kaili & Çeltek 2012 for further discussion on these uses). Additionally, -mIş bears some pragmatic extensions which cannot be described as evidential. It is also used to describe admiration on the part of the speaker about the actuality of the event (23). It is also used in traditional narrative (24) and to express scorn or irony on the part of the speaker (25): (23) (Uttered by a speaker who opens the door and sees Aysun – a totally unexpected visitor) Aysun gel-miş Aysun come-mış-3sg ‘Aysun has come’ (24) Pinokyo yalan söyle-yince burn-u uza-mış Pinocchio lie tell-cvb nose-poss.3sg grow-mış.3sg ‘When Pinocchio lied his nose had grown’

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(25) (Told to a child who claims to have studied a lot before an exam when her/his father sees her/his low score) Evet, sonuç-lar-dan gör-ebil-iyor-um. Çok çalış-mış-sın yes result-pl-abl see-pot-(I)yor-1sg much study-mış-2sg ‘I can see it from the results. You have studied a lot!’

3.2

Greek

As for the Greek verbal system, verb forms morphologically encode person, number, tense, aspect, voice and, to some extent, mood (Holton, Mackridge & Philippaki-­Warburton 1997). Greek distinguishes between past and non-past tenses by means of suffixes as well as stress, since past tense verb forms are stressed on the antepenultimate: (26) a. δjavázo read.impf.nonpst.1sg ‘I read’ and ‘I am reading’ b. δjávaza read.impf.pst.1sg ‘I was reading’

The suffix -a- (26b) denotes past, while suffix -o- in (26a) denotes non-past tense. Greek is a diffusional language and, thus, the aforementioned suffixes also encode information about person and number, 1st singular in examples (26a) and (26b). The Greek verbal system is further characterized by the morphological distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect. Imperfective aspect is specified on the verbal stem. For example, the verbal stem δjaváz- in (26a) and (26b) is imperfective. The perfective aspect is marked either via suffix -s- (27a), or via stem allomorphy (27b) or lexically through a perfective stem (27c) in suppletive forms (Ralli 2005): (27) a. δjávasa > δjaváz read.pf.pst.1sg > read.impf b. éfiγa > -févγ leave.pf.pst.1sg > leave.impf c. íδa > -vlép see.pf.pst.1sg > – see.impf

The imperfective–perfective distinction is evident in past tenses as well as in future, subjunctive and imperative verb forms, as shown in examples (28a)–(28d). However, the morphological distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect is not apparent in the present:



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

(28) a. δjávaza – δjávasa read.impf.pst.1sg – read.pf.pst.1sg b. θa δjavázo – θa δjaváso fut read.impf.nonpst.1sg – fut read.pf.nonpst.1sg c. na δjavázo – na δjaváso subj read.impf.nonpst.1sg – subj read.pf.nonpst.1sg d. δjávaze – δjávase read.impf.imp.2sg – fut read.pf.imp.2sg

Furthermore, perfective aspect denotes boundedness, while imperfective aspect denotes an event which is either unbounded or habitual (Comrie 1976; Mozer 1994). Future in Greek is indicated by means of the particle θa and, hence, the verb is not affixed with a particular morpheme: (29) θa δjaváso θα read.pf.nonpst.1sg

Modality in Greek is not denoted by separate affixes. Rather the modal interpretation is acquired through the interaction of various factors (Holton et al. 1997). Clairis and Babiniotis (1999) maintain that the particles θa, na and as2 together with the suffixes denoting imperative mood are modality markers. Tsangalidis (2001) argues that θa, na and as are modal particles in Greek and they express several modal meanings, like deontic as well as epistemic modality. For example, when the particles θa and na are combined with a past perfective verb form, they indicate epistemic modality (30a). They tend to represent deontic modality (30b) when linked with non-past perfective verb forms (Iakovou 1999; Roussou 1999; Tsangalidis 1999; Veloudis 1985). (30) a. θa éfiγe θa leave.pf.pst.3sg ‘S/he must have left’ b. θa fíji θa leave.pf.nonpst.3sg ‘S/he will (probably) leave’

Notice, however, that, as Tsangalidis notes (2001: 763), these three particles do not necessarily signify a modal meaning. The particle θa does not acquire a modal interpretation when used to encode future (Tsangalidis 2001). A modal meaning is not involved in control structures with na as shown in (31) (Veloudis 2001). 2. The markers θa, na and as express modal functions. The marker θa also denotes futurity, while na and as denote the subjunctive mood.

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(31) epixírise na fíγi attempt-pf.pst.3sg subj leave-pf.nonpst.3sg ‘s/he attempted to leave’

Furthermore, modality may be expressed with lexical verbs. Verbs such as nomízo (to think), fandázome (to assume) denote epistemic modality, whereas verbs such as elpízo (to hope), epitrépo (to allow) express deontic modality. Such modal interpretations are also encoded in adverbials such as katá ti γnómi mu (in my view), málon (maybe). Tsangalidis (2004, 2009) argues that the three modal verbs, prépi (must, should), borí (may) and boró (can) are the means of expressing modality grammatically. Moreover, while borí denotes epistemic modality, and boró expresses deontic modality, prépi is ambiguous between the deontic and the epistemic modality (Tsangalidis 2003). Additionally, Greek does not appear to have separate grammatical markers to express evidentiality (Tsangalidis 2012), in contrast to Turkish and also to other languages in the Balkans. Joseph and Philippaki-Warburton (1987: 185) argue that evidentiality is lexically and not morphologically marked in Greek. The adverbial táxa (maybe) has been treated by Ifantidou (2001: 170–171) as a weak evidentiality marker; however, it cannot be considered as a systematic means for the encoding of evidentiality (Aikhenvald 2004: 150–151). Setatos (1994a, 1994b) discusses examples, which involve the impersonal use of the verb léo (to say) as well as the form parakaló and attributes evidential meanings to these verb forms. (32) káti éjine, léi, pro imerón me káti apelpisménus sthg happen.pf.pst.3sg lei before days with some desperate anθrópus people ‘Something happened, they say, some days ago with some desperate people’ (33) ke teliká ta píje θavmásia parakaló and finally cl.3pl go.pf.pst.3sg perfectly please ‘And in the end s/he did perfectly, mind you’

Tsangalidis (2012) argues that these two verb forms cannot be considered as grammatical markers of evidentiality but rather as lexical means to express assumptions and hedging. The aforementioned discussion regarding the way Turkish and Greek express tense, aspect and modality shows that both Turkish and Greek employ suffixes to encode tense and aspect. However, only Turkish expresses modal uses by means of suffixes, which are incorporated within the verb form. Furthermore, imperfective aspect in Greek encodes progressivity, continuity and habituality on the same



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

verb form, while the three features are expressed with different suffixes in Turkish. In the next section we present our experimental study in detail. 4. The present study As stated earlier in the paper, the purpose of the present study is to identify the most problematic morphology within TAM and to account for the results on the basis of the inherent functional characteristics of the relevant morphology in Turkish as well potential L1 Greek influence. The analysis of TAM markers in Turkish and Greek presented in the previous section shows that tense and aspect are morphologically encoded in the two languages. Modality, however, is expressed through bound morphemes which represent functional categories in Turkish, while it is mainly denoted by lexical verbs and (free standing) adverbs in Greek. Moreover, research on the acquisition of TAM markers in L2 French, Italian, Spanish, Turkish and Greek, as well as previous work on the L1 acquisition of Turkish TAM morphology suggests that modality is acquired late. Therefore, we expect that the modal uses of the Turkish morphemes will be more vulnerable than tense and aspectual suffixes in the interlanguage of L1 Greek learners. In Section 4.1 we present the method of the present study while our findings are described in Section 4.2. 4.1

Method

4.1.1 Participants Fifteen adult L2 learners (L2ers) of Turkish (12 females and 3 males) who participated in this study were native Greek speakers with a mean age of 36.6. A background questionnaire was given to the participants to elicit demographic and linguistic information about them (see Table 1 for a summary). The questionnaire revealed that all the participants were university graduates and six of them had a Master’s degree. Eight of the participants were graduates of four different Greek universities, where Turkish is taught as a foreign language, either as a compulsory, or an elective course for at least four semesters. The rest were taught Turkish Table 1.  The L2 participants’ profile Mean age (age range) of the participants Mean age (range) of first exposure to Turkish Mean length (range) of L2 Turkish exposure Mean length (range) of stay in Turkey

36.6 years (27–54 years) 25.73 years (18–47 years)   3.87 years (2–7 years) 17.53 months (0–72 months)

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in private institutions or via private tutoring. All participants had been learning Turkish for at least two years (receiving at least two hours/per week Turkish instruction) at the time of testing. They were intermediate or advanced learners. More specifically, two participants were at B1 level, six were at B2 level and seven were at C1 level.3 Ten of them had lived in Turkey for more than six months in the past two years. They all stated that they had good to excellent knowledge of English and that they had fairly good knowledge of a language other than English. The characteristics of the L2 participants are summarized in Table 1. The tasks conducted have also been administered to a control group of 15 monolingual native speakers (NS) of Turkish who lived in Turkey (13 females and two males; mean age: 48.4 years).4 4.1.2 Experimental tasks We employed a written and an oral task in order to explore the learners’ production of TAM markers. The written task was a fill-in-the-blank task, while the oral task was an elicited oral imitation task (EOIT). The fill-in-the-blank task was chosen as it constitutes an efficient way to assess L2ers’ production of predetermined grammatical morphemes (cf. Papadopoulou et al. 2011). Based on previous work (e.g. Erlam 2006; Gallimore & Tharp 1981; Weitze et al. 2011), we also assume that while a written task would tap more on conscious processes, an oral task would involve less conscious automatic language processes. Moreover, the EOIT allowed us to collect data from all the suffixes we aimed at investigating, which would have been problematic in, for example, spontaneous speech particularly because of the difficulty of eliciting certain uses of target morphemes.

4.1.2.1  Fill-in-the-blank task. The task, constructed by the first two authors, consisted of 12 contextualized short texts with 81 gaps. All the gaps involved verbal morphemes denoting tense, aspect, modality, and subject-verb agreement. Texts 1–7 (gaps 1–51) targeted -(A/I)r, -(I)yor or -(y)AcAK and included all their possible uses. More specifically, there were three gaps that targeted exclusively -(I)yor with its progressive meaning (see 3.1.1); 16 gaps that targeted exclusively -(A/I)r (one with its habitual meaning, four with epistemic meaning and 11 with deontic meaning) (see 3.1.2); four gaps that targeted exclusively -(y)AcAK with its future meaning (see 3.1.3); four that targeted -(I)yor or -(y)AcAK with their future 3. According to the scale of the Common European Framework for Languages the participants held a certificate, either by the Greek National Foreign Language Exam System (KPG) or by Turkish and Foreign Language Research and Application Centre (TÖMER) of the University of Ankara. 4. Efforts were made so that the profiles of the native speakers matched the ones of the L2ers in terms of socioeconomic factors.



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

meaning; 14 that targeted -(I)yor or -(A/I)r (five with their habitual meaning, one with their future meaning and eight with their demonstration meaning); eight that targeted -(y)AcAK or -(A/I)r (three with their modal meaning, two with their future meaning, two with their deontic meaning and one with their epistemic meaning); and two where all three morphemes -(I)yor/-(A/I)r/-(y)AcAK would be acceptable with their future meaning. Also, there were 11 gaps denoting deontic modality and could be filled with the imperative mood alternatively. Example (34) illustrates the first text of the fill-in-the-blank task: (34) (Lokantada) Ali: Almanlar genellikle bira iç______ ama bak yan masadaki Almanlar rakı iç_________ . Bahattin: Hadi, biz de siparişimizi verelim artık. Sen ne iç________ ? Ali: Ben genelde kırmızı şarap iç_______ ama bu akşam ben de rakı içmek iste_________ . Peki, sen ne iç_________ ? Bahattin: Ben hiç rakı sev____________ (-). Ben beyaz şarap iç_________ . Garson bey bak______ _______ ? Garson: Hemen gel________ efendim! … Evet, buyurun. Ne al________ ? Bahattin: Bize bir kadeh rakı ve bir kadeh beyaz şarap getir______ ______ ? Garson: Elbette efendim. (At a restaurant) ‘Ali: Germans usually drink beer but look at the next table, the Germans are drinking raki. Bahattin: Come on, let us order as well. What will you drink? Ali: I usually drink red wine, but tonight I want to drink raki, too. So, what will you drink? Bahattin: I don’t like raki at all. I’ll drink white wine. Waiter, can you serve us? Waitress: I am coming right up, sir! … Yes, please. What can I get for you? Bahattin: Can you bring us a glass of raki and a glass of white wine, please? Waiter: Yes, sir.’

Texts 8–12 (gaps 52–81) targeted -DI or -mIş. Six gaps in these texts targeted -DI while 24 gaps targeted -mIş and included all possible types of evidential values (see uses of -mIş in the examples of Section 3.1.5).5 Example (35) illustrates the eighth text of the fill-in-the-blank task: (35) Eşim akşamları eve saat 7’de gelir. Önceki akşam çok geç gel_____ . Eşim gelince bana anlat_____, yolda kaza yap______ . Başka bir araba eşimin arabasına çarp________ . Polis olayı görünce eşime “çok kötü bir kaza 5. The different number of gaps per suffix is due to the multifunctionality of some suffixes.

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yap__________” demiş. Ertesi gün gazete oku____ ; eşim gerçekten de kötü bir kaza yap_____. ‘My wife/husband comes home at 7 o’clock in the evening. The previous evening s/he arrived very late. When s/he came s/he told me that s/he had an accident on the road. My wife’s/husband’s car was hit by another car. (S/he told me that) the police officer, upon seeing the incident, said to her/ him “You’ve had a terrible accident”. I read the newspaper the next day, my wife/husband had had a really bad accident.’

4.1.2.2  Elicited oral imitation task. This task consisted of 88 sentences (45 grammatical and 43 ungrammatical, 5 to 8 words each) of 10–18 syllables in length (with the mean length of 15 syllables),6 containing a verbal predicate in -(I)yor, -(A/I)r, -(y)AcAK, -DI or -mIş. More specifically, the suffixes -DI, -mIş, -(I)yor, -(A/I)r and -(y)AcAK were tested in 9, 27, 16, 29 and 9 utterances, respectively. As in the fill-in-the-blank task, attention was paid to include all the possible uses of each morpheme. (36)–(40) are examples of the sentences used in the EOIT. (36) Ali gazete-de oku-muş. Japonya’-da deprem Ali newspaper-loc read-mIş.3sg Japan-loc earthquake ol-muş happen-mış.3sg ‘Ali read it in the newspaper. There was an earthquake in Japan.’ (37)  *Ben genellikle akşam ev-e geç dön-eceğ-im I usually evening home-dat late come.back-acak.1sg (intended meaning) ‘I usually come back home late in the evening’ (expected morpheme -(A/I)r or -(I)yor) ( 38)  *Bilet-im-i al-dı-m. Yarın İzmir’-e uçar-ım ticket-poss.1sg-acc take-dı-1sg tomorrow Izmir-dat fly-(a/i)r-1sg (intended meaning) ‘I bought my ticket. Tomorrow I’m flying to Izmir’ (expected morpheme -(y)AcAK or -(I)yor) (39) Ders-ler-in-e çalış, arkadaş-lar-ın-la lesson-pl-poss.2sg-dat study.ımp.2sg friend-pl-poss.2sg-ıns oynarsın play-(a/ı)r-2sg ‘Do your homework and you can play with your friends’

6. Initially, both categories included 45 sentences. However, 2 of the ungrammatical sentences proved to be unclear and confusing for both the NS and the L2ers. Thus, they were excluded from the analysis.



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

(40) *Kendi göz-ler-im-le gör-dü-m. Bu tabağ-ı sen kır-mış-sın self eye-pl-poss.1sg-ıns see-dı-1sg this plate-acc you break-mış-2sg ‘I saw it with my own eyes. You broke this plate’ (expected morpheme -DI)

4.1.3 Procedure The fill-in-the-blank task was presented to each participant separately in printed form, as illustrated in examples (34) and (35). The participants were instructed to read the short texts and fill in the blanks appropriately. They were given 60 minutes to complete the task, even though none of the participants (either the NS or L2ers) used more than 40 minutes to fill in the blanks. The EOIT was designed to be completed under time pressure. It was carried out in one-to-one meetings between a researcher7 and a participant. The sentences were recorded by a native Turkish speaker (the first author), and were orally presented to the test-takers. The participants were told that they would listen to Turkish sentences, some of which were correct and some incorrect. Their task was to repeat the sentences correctly immediately after they listened to the entire sentence. In line with Erlam (2009), the test administrator would move to the next item when the test-taker did either of the followings: (i) repeated a sentence correctly; (ii) attempted to repeat a given sentence; (iii) failed to show an attempt to repeat a particular sentence. The procedure included three training examples for participants. The responses were audio-recorded. It took 10–15 minutes to complete the test with the NS and 15–20 with the L2ers. In this paper we focus on the TAM markers and we will not discuss any other errors produced by the speakers. Regarding the data coding, grammatical sentences repeated as given were considered as accurate. Ungrammatical sentences repeated as presented without any correction or altered by means of a different but still erroneous TAM marker were regarded as inaccurate. On the other hand, ungrammatical utterances which were corrected as expected were considered as accurate. While accurate responses were assigned one point and inaccurate responses were assigned zero points. 4.2

Results

In the next sections we present the findings from the written fill-in-the-blank task and the ΕΟΙΤ. In all the statistical analyses reported below we employed

7. The first author collected the data from the L2 participants while the second author collected the native data set.

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non-­parametric statistical tests, because most of the data sets were not normally distributed, as revealed by the Shapiro-Wilk normality test (p < .01). In all between-group comparisons, namely the comparison between the NS and the L2ers, the Mann-Whitney test was employed, while the Wilcoxon test was used for within-group comparisons. 4.2.1 Fill-in-the-blank task The data obtained from the fill-in-the-blank task were first analyzed in terms of correct responses per suffix and group. The error patterns were also analyzed. Data analysis also included participants’ responses for cases in which two suffixes were acceptable. The use of target suffixes by NS and L2ers is given in Table 2. As displayed in Table 2, overall, NS performed slightly better (85.06%) than the L2ers (81.60%), while this difference was not significant (p > .1). Additionally, native speaker advantage is apparent on all suffixes with the exception of the suffix -(I)yor. Both groups exhibit best performance on the suffix -DI. The morpheme -(I)yor seems to be the most problematic suffix for NS, while -mIş appears to be the most challenging suffix for L2ers. We will first discuss the suffixes -DI and -mIş. As Table 2 illustrates both groups performed at ceiling, above 90%, on the suffix -DI, while their accuracy on -mIş is significantly lower. The Mann-Whitney test did not reveal any significant differences between the two groups (p > .1 for both suffixes). Moreover, the Wilcoxon test was employed in order to compare the accuracy scores for -DI and -mIş within each group. Both groups performed significantly better at the suffix -DI than the suffix -mIş (NS: z = 3.309, p = .001; L2ers: z = 3.415, p = .001). As for the remaining suffixes, NS performed very close to 90% on suffixes, -(A/I)r and -(y)AcAK, as expected. It is noticeable, however, that they performed Table 2.  Fill-in-the-blank task. (In)correct use per suffix for NS and L2ers Suffixes

No. of items

DI mIş (A/I)r (I)yor (y)AcAK Total

  6 x 15 = 90 24 x 15 = 360 17 x 15 = 255   3 x 15 = 45   4 x 15 = 60 54*x 15 = 810

No. of correct Mean percent- No. of substitu- Mean percentuse age accuracy tion errors age substitu(%) tion (%) NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

 89 288 225  35  52 689

 89 280 202  42  48 661

98.89 80.00 88.24 77.78 86.67 85.06

98.89 77.78 79.22 93.33 80.00 81.60

  1  72  30  10   8 121

  1  80  53   3  12 149

 1.11 20.00 11.76 22.22 13.33 14.94

 1.11 22.22 20.78  6.67 20.00 18.40

* The remaining 27 gaps involved cases where two suffixes were correct and are presented later in the section.



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish



lower (77.788%) on the suffix -(I)yor. A different pattern was attested in L2 data. Namely, L2ers appeared to display more difficulty with suffixes -(A/I)r and -(y)AcAK (accuracy rate: 80%), while they performed above 90% on -(I)yor. The between-group comparisons revealed no statistically significant effects in either suffix, even though the difference between NS and L2ers in -(A/I)r approached significance (z = 1.851, p = .064), indicating that the suffix -(A/I)r is challenging for L2ers. Moreover, the comparisons among -(A/I)r, -(y)AcAK and -(I)yor in NS data did not show any significant effects (p>.1). On the other hand, L2ers performed significantly better on -(I)yor than on -(A/I)r (z = 2.170, p = .030), confirming that L2ers experience difficulties with suffix -(A/I)r compared to the other non-past morphemes tested. We will now focus on the substitution errors produced by our participants. Regarding the suffix -DI, each group made only one error out of 90 gaps: one native speaker erroneously used -(A/I)r, while one L2 learner provided the converbial suffix -(y)Ip. The error rate increased for suffix -mIş. More specifically, NS made 72 errors out of 360 cases, whereas L2 data displayed 78 errors. The error patterns per group are illustrated in Figure 1, which indicates the morphemes by which the target suffix -mIş has erroneously been substituted. As shown in Figure 1, both groups overgeneralized the suffix -DI. In other words, they used -DI in place of -mIş. The second most overused suffix in the NS data set was -(A/I)r (8%), while in L2 data the second most erroneously supplied suffix was -mIştI (9%). The error patterns exhibited by both groups on the suffix -(A/I)r are presented in Figure 2. This figure indicates the morphemes by which the target suffix -(A/I)r has erroneously been substituted. Out of 255 gaps, the number of errors committed by NS and L2ers was 29 and 53, respectively. The error distribution was also different in the two groups. The L2ers overused -(y)AcAK at a rate of 75%. NS also overgeneralized -(y)AcAK but           

mIștI (I)yor (A/I)r DI

NS

L2ers

Figure 1.  Written fill-in-the-blank task. Error patterns for -mIş

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94 Hasan Kaili, Aytaç Çeltek and Despina Papadopoulou

          

other (I)yor



(y)AcAK

NS

L2ers

Figure 2.  Written fill-in-the-blank task. Error patterns for -(A/I)r           

DI



(A/I)r

NS

L2ers (I)yor

NS

L2ers (y)AcAK

Figure 3.  Fill-in-the-blank task. Error patterns for -(I)yor and -(y)AcAK

less so (31%) compared to the L2ers. Moreover, NS overused other suffixes (52%) to a greater extent than the L2ers (23%).8 The overuse rate for -(y)AcAK is significantly higher (χ2 = 15.077, p < .001) than that for other suffixes in the L2 data, while this difference was insignificant in the NS data (p > .1). The error patterns for suffixes -(I)yor and -(y)AcAK are presented in Figure 3, which indicates the morphemes by which the target suffixes -(I)yor and -(y)AcAK have erroneously been substituted. L2ers made ten errors out of 45 obligatory contexts targeting -(I)yor. These errors involved the misuse of suffixes -(A/I)r (40%) and -DI (60%). The L2 data 8. The other suffixes denote the optative, the converb -dIğIndA, the imperative and the necessity.



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

          

NS



L2ers

(A/I)r/(y)AcAK

(A/I)r/(I)yor

(y)AcAK/(I)yor

Figure 4.  Mean accuracy percentages on suffix pairs per group

displayed the same error types, though the errors made by the learners are very few (only three). Regarding the suffix -(y)AcAK, almost all the errors (eight for the NS and 12 for the L2 group out of 60 obligatory contexts per group) committed by both groups involved the misuse of -(A/I)r. Finally, in the analysis of the fill-in-the-gap data, we examined the contexts, in which two suffixes were considered as correct.9 The groups’ performance in such cases is displayed in Figure 4. In both groups, accuracy exceeds 90% in all morphemes. Nevertheless, L2ers performed better than NS. This advantage for the L2 group is significant only in contexts which require -(A/I)r/–(y)AcAK (z = 2.950, p = .003), probably due to the fact that L2ers performed at ceiling (100% accurate) on this condition. Since the number of errors is very small in these conditions, we will rather provide an analysis as to which suffix the two groups preferred to use when optionality is possible. Figure 5 provides the relevant data. It appeared that the two groups did not manifest any preference in contexts which allowed both -(A/I)r and -(y)AcAK (p > .1). On the other hand, both groups showed a significant preference for the suffix -(A/I)r (NS: χ2 = 7.049, p = .008; L2ers: χ2 = 46.436, p < .000), when both -(A/I)r and -(I)yor were acceptable. Finally, preference for the use of -(y)AcAK is manifested in both data sets in environments, where -(I)yor was also acceptable (NS: χ2 = 22.261, p < .000; L2ers: χ2 = 41.679, p < .000). 9. In 7 contexts, morphemes -(A/I)r and -(y)AcAK were both acceptable; in 14 contexts, -(A/I)r and -(I)yor were acceptable and in 4 contexts, -(y)AcAK and -(I)yor were both allowed. There were three gaps in which all three morphemes, -(A/I)r, -(y)AcAK and -(I)yor were allowed. These cases have not been analyzed further.

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96 Hasan Kaili, Aytaç Çeltek and Despina Papadopoulou

(I)yor (y)AcAK (A/I)r



          

NS

L2ers

(A/I)r/(y)AcAK

NS

L2ers

(A/I)r/(I)yor

NS

L2ers

(y)AcAK/(I)yor

Figure 5.  Written fill-in-the-blank task. Preferences for -(A/I)r, -(I)yor and -(y)AcAK per group

4.2.2 Elicited oral imitation task We intended to collect 1320 utterances (88 utterances x 15 participants) per group. Cases in which the participants were unable to repeat a certain utterance were excluded from any subsequent analyses. This resulted in the exclusion of 0.08% of the NS data (1319 utterances out of 1320) and 2% of the L2 data (1296 utterances out of 1320 utterances). First we present participants’ overall accuracy on the grammatical and the ungrammatical sentences. Secondly, we discuss the participants’ performance οn each suffix for the grammatical and then for the ungrammatical sentences. Table 3 illustrates the participants’ accurate and inaccurate repetition of sentences involving grammatical and ungrammatical use of target morphemes. As the data in Table 3 indicate, both groups manifested significantly better performance on grammatical than on ungrammatical sentences (NS: χ2 = 6.264, p = .012; L2ers: χ2 = 7.392, p = .007). Furthermore, performance of NS was better than that of L2ers in both grammatical and ungrammatical conditions. This Table 3.  Overall (in)accurate repetition in the EOIT Sentences

No. of items

No. of correct Mean percent- No. of inaccu- Mean inaccurepetition age accuracy rate repetition rate repetition percentage

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

Gram. Ungram. Total

 674  645 1319

 663  633 1296

 669  523 1192

 620  473 1093

99 81 90

94 75 84

  6 122 127

 43 160 203

 1 19 10

 6 25 16



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

Table 4.  (In)accurate repetition of grammatical sentences in the EOIT Suffixes

DI mIş (A/I)r (I)yor (y)AcAK

No. of items

No. of correct Mean percent- No. of inaccu- Mean inaccurepetition age accuracy rate repetition rate repetition percentage

NS

L2ers*

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

NS

L2ers

   60** 209 270  90  60

 57 205 283  89  59

 58 195 269  88  59

 54 174 251  84  57

97 93  99.6 98 98

95 85 89 94 97

 2 14  1  2  1

 3 31 32  5  1

3 7  0.4 2 2

 5 15 11  6  3

* The number of items is different in each participant group because L2ers did not provide a response in 24 instances in total. ** These numbers were obtained by multiplying the number of items with the number of participants, which is 15.

difference approached significance in the overall data (i.e. when grammatical and ungrammatical conditions collapsed) (z = 1.908, p = .056). It was also significant in the grammatical sentences (z = 2.029, p = .042 but not in the ungrammatical sentences (p > .1). Table 4 presents the grammatical sentences by focusing on performance of the groups on each suffix. More specifically, the table displays (in) accurate repetition of grammatical sentences involving target suffixes. As can be seen in Table 4, NS performed better than L2ers, although this effect appeared to be more salient in the grammatical sentences involving suffixes -mIş and -(A/I)r. The statistical analyses confirmed that NS performed significantly better than L2ers in grammatical sentences with -(A/I)r (z = 2.559, p = .045), while the NS’ higher performance for –mIş only approached significance (z = 1.846, p = .065). With respect to the suffix -DI, very few errors (i.e. 2 by NS and 3 by L2ers out of 60 obligatory contexts per group) were committed in the grammatical sentences. More specifically, NS used -mIş instead of -DI, while L2ers overgeneralized -mIş, -mIştI and -(y)AcAK. As for the suffix -mIş, most of the erroneous productions (i.e. 14 for NS and 31 for L2ers) consisted of the use of -DI in these contexts.10 The grammatical sentences targeting the suffix -(y)AcAK were responded to highly accurately, as shown in Table 5. In one context NS produced -(A/I)r, while in two contexts L2ers used -(A/I)r and -(I)yor. Regarding -(I)yor, while NS 10. There were three exceptions to this pattern in each data set (NS: one erroneous use of -(I)yor and two erroneous uses of -(A/I)r; L2ers: two erroneous uses of -(I)yor and one erroneous use of suffix -(A/I)r).

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98 Hasan Kaili, Aytaç Çeltek and Despina Papadopoulou

Table 5.  (In)accurate repetition of ungrammatical sentences in the EOIT Suffixes

No. of items

No. of accurate repetition and correction

Mean percentage accuracy

No. of inaccurate repetition

L2ers

NS

L2ers

NS

 68

 65

91

89

 7

 8

 9

11

NS L2ers* NS Target suffix: DI Suffix produced: mIş

  75**  73

Mean inaccurate repetition percentage

L2ers NS L2ers

Target suffix: -mIş Suffix produced: -DI

195

194

144

146

74

75

51

48

26

25

Target suffix: -(A/I)r Suffix produced: -(I)yor (8 times) -(y)AcAK (2 times)

165

158

151

103

92

65

14

55

 8

35

Target suffix: -(I)yor Suffix produced: -(A/I)r (5 times) -(y)AcAK (5 times)

150

148

118

127

79

86

32

21

21

14

Target suffix: -(y)AcAK  45 Suffix produced: -(A/I)r)

 45

 42

 32

93

71

 3

13

 7

29

* The number of items is different from that in the NS group because L2ers did not provide a response in overall 24 instances. ** These numbers were obtained by multiplying the number of items with the number of participants, which is 15.

produced two errors (one use of -(A/I)r and one of -mIş), L2ers committed 5 errors (3 uses of -(A/I)r, one use of -(y)AcAK and one use of -DI). In one grammatical sentence requiring -(A/I)r, NS mistakenly used -(y)AcAK. However, L2ers produced 19 such substitution errors. More specifically, in eleven contexts which required -(A/I)r, -(y)AcAK was used. Furthermore, the suffixes, -(I)yor and -DI were mistakenly used in -(A/I)r contexts in 6 and 2 times, respectively. However, the difference between the two most frequent errors was not significant (p > .1). Table 5 presents the participants’ accuracy for the ungrammatical sentences. More specifically, the table displays (in)accurate repetition of ungrammatical sentences involving target suffixes. The data in Table 5 indicate that the NS group is better than L2ers at detecting the ungrammaticality and correcting it, with the exception of -mIş, where both groups behaved similarly, and -(I)yor, in which L2ers exhibited better performance. Nevertheless, only the NS’ higher performance for -(y)AcAK approached significance (z = 1.862, p = .063).



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish

          

other (I)yor (A/I)r



(y)AcAK

NS

L2ers (I)yor

NS

L2ers (A/I)r

Figure 6.  The EOIT. Error pattern for -(A/I)r and -(I)yor in ungrammatical sentences per group

Furthermore, in the ungrammatical sentences which the participants had to correct by replacing -mIş with -DI, almost all the errors11 committed by both groups (7 cases in the NS data and 8 cases in the L2 data) involved the repetition of the erroneous suffix, -mIş. Additionally, all the errors in the ungrammatical sentences (51 errors in the NS data and 48 errors in the L2 data), which the participants had to correct by replacing -DI by -mIş, consisted of the repetition of -DI. Regarding the sentences, in which -(A/I)r should have been replaced by -(y)AcAK, both groups erroneously retained -(A/I)r (3 errors by NS and 13 errors by L2ers out of 45 obligatory contexts per group). The error types for the ungrammatical sentences targeting suffixes -(I)yor and -(A/I)r are presented in Figure 6, which indicates the morphemes by which the target suffixes -(A/I)r and -(I)yor have erroneously been substituted. In the ungrammatical sentences targeting -(I)yor, NS overgeneralized -(A/I)r (9 out of 32 errors) and -(y)AcAK (17 out of 32 errors); the difference between the two error types was not significant (p > .1). Notice, however, that in most erroneous productions NS failed to replace an incorrect suffix with the targeted one. On the contrary, L2ers mainly overgeneralized -(A/I)r (16 out of 21 errors); the overuse of -(A/I)r significantly outnumbered the other error types (χ2 = 8.895, p = .003). The ungrammatical sentences in which -(A/I)r should have been replaced by -(y)AcAK elicited 100% accuracy in both groups. On the other hand, in the ungrammatical sentences in which -(A/I)r should have been replaced by -(I)yor, 11. There was only one case in which the L2ers produced suffix -mIştI.

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100 Hasan Kaili, Aytaç Çeltek and Despina Papadopoulou

NS either erroneously maintained -(I)yor (9 out of 14 errors) or produced the inaccurate suffix -(y)AcAK (4 out of 14 errors); the two error frequencies did not manifest a significant difference (p > .1). The L2 errors were equally divided into the misuses of -(y)AcAK (26 out of 55 errors) and -(I)yor (26 out of 55 errors). A final point which deserves mentioning is that L2ers, contrary to the NS, overgeneralized -(y)AcAK in -(A/I)r contexts denoting deontic modality (see examples (10)–(13)). This point will be discussed in the discussion section. 4.3

Summary of the main findings

Overall our data from the written task revealed no significant differences between the two groups. When we look at each suffix separately, L2ers are indistinguishable from NS in all suffixes with the exception of -(A/I)r, which appears to be the most challenging suffix for the learners. On the other hand, NS performed lower than expected on the suffix -(I)yor (78%). Nevertheless, this accuracy score was not found to be statistically different from those obtained in other suffixes. Furthermore, the error patterns from both groups largely converged; -DI was overgeneralized in -mIş contexts and -(A/I)r was overused in -(y)AcAK contexts. Additionally, the Greek speakers of Turkish overgeneralized -(y)AcAK in -(A/I)r contexts. Finally, the two groups exhibited the same preferences when two suffixes were equally possible. More specifically, -(A/I)r and -(y)AcAK were preferably employed by our participants in contexts where -(I)yor was also possible. In the oral task, overall NS outperformed L2ers. The same result was obtained in the grammatical sentence condition. In addition, both groups performed more accurately on the grammatical than the ungrammatical sentences. In other words, it was more difficult for both groups to detect the use of an incorrect morpheme and replace it with a correct one. Regarding the grammatical sentences, -(A/I)r was challenging for L2ers in this task, too. The suffix -mIş also appeared to be problematic. In the ungrammatical sentences, L2ers exhibited problems with -(y)AcAK compared to the NS group. Regarding the error patterns, both groups overgeneralized the suffix -DI in -mIş contexts and -(A/I)r in -(y)AcAK contexts, as they did in the written task. In -(A/I)r contexts, L2ers overused the suffix -(y)AcAK, especially in deontic contexts, which replicates the findings from the written task. Furthermore, -(A/I)r was overgeneralized by L2ers in -(I)yor contexts, whereas NS did not show any preference between -(I)yor and -(y)AcAK.



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish 101

5. Discussion and conclusion The findings of the present study, in line with previous work of Giacalone Ramat (1992) and Howard (2008), provide support for our prediction that L2ers will experience more difficulty with modality rather than with tense and aspectual markers. Our findings suggest that tense has been acquired as the L2ers’ performance on -DI and -(y)AcAK, denoting past and future, respectively, is indistinguishable from that of native speakers. Moreover, the learners demonstrate accurate uses of -(I)yor as well as the aspectual meanings of -(A/I)r (see example (42)). On the other hand, the learners exhibit problems with -(A/I)r and -mIş, which mainly express modal uses in Turkish. The learners’ difficulties with these two suffixes may be attributed to the multifunctionality of the two markers. As discussed in Sections 3.1.2 and 3.1.5, these morphemes encode tense, aspect as well as a variety of deontic and epistemic uses. In other words, the intrinsic semantic properties of -(A/I)r and -mIş appear to be particularly challenging in L2 Turkish learners. Alternatively, one could argue that the problems L2ers experience with -(A/I)r and -mIş are due to the fact that L1 Greek encodes modality lexically rather than through affixation. More specifically, the deontic and epistemic uses of -(A/I)r (compare Turkish examples (8)–(12) to Greek examples (30a–b) as well the evidential use of -mIş (compare Turkish examples (21)–(22) to Greek examples (32)–(33) are represented with lexical verbs and adverbs in Greek. Notice further that all the errors the learners produced in -(A/I)r contexts were attested in modal, epistemic or deontic, uses (41) but not in habitual (42) contexts: (41) Yemek tamam-sa diğer iş-ler-i sen çabucak Meal allright-cond.3sg other work-pl-acc you quickly bitir-ir-sin finish-(a/ı)r-2sg ‘If the meal is all right, you will quickly finish the other things.’ (42) Ben genelde kırmızı şarap iç-er-im. I usually red wine drink-(a/ı)r-1sg ‘I usually drink red wine’

Furthermore, the data from both tasks indicated that -(y)AcAK was overgeneralized by L2ers in -(A/I)r contexts that bore a deontic meaning. This may also be taken as evidence for L1 transfer, since deontic uses, such as volition, willingness or promise, can be expressed by means of the marker θa combined with non-past perfective verb forms in Greek (see example (30b)). It seems that the uses of θa, which also expresses future (see example (29)), have been assigned by the Greek

102 Hasan Kaili, Aytaç Çeltek and Despina Papadopoulou

learners to suffix -(y)AcAK. Nevertheless, the inclusion of an L2 group whose L1 would bare similarities with Turkish in the way modality is expressed, could have provided a more definite answer as to whether difficulty in the use of -(A/I)r and -mIş stems from intrinsic semantic features of the two markers or from L1 influence. We leave this issue open for future research. Additionally, -(y)AcAK poses some difficulty for L2ers, as evident in the ungrammatical sentences of the oral task. This is unexpected given that -(y)AcAK is a futurity marker. However, when we look at the data more closely, we observe L2ers’ low performance is mainly detected in the following sentence: (43) Sen-i uyar-ıyor-um. *Bilgisayar-ım-la oyna-maz-sın. You-acc warn-(ı)yor.1sg computer-poss.1sg-ıns play-neg(a/ı)r-2sg ‘I warn you. You will not play with my computer.’ (Intended meaning: ‘You are not allowed to play with my computer’, which should be stated by the form oynamayacaksın)

Notice that the targeted -(y)AcAK in (43) would not indicate future tense but deontic modality. The same pattern was obtained in the written task. In other words, the learners produced very few errors when -(y)AcAK expresses modality and not future tense. In these cases, the learners overgeneralized -(A/I)r, which implies that they tend to assign one meaning to each suffix. In other words, they seem to perceive -(y)AcAK as a future marker and -(A/I)r as a modality marker. We think that the multifunctionality of the Turkish TAM markers as well as the sharing of some uses by more than one suffix complicate L2 acquisition. In sum, our findings indicate that modality markers are acquired later than tense and aspect markers. Moreover, the modal uses of suffixes -(A/I)r and -mIş appear to be difficult for Greek learners of L2 Turkish. We argue that the use of the morphemes under study is characterized to some extent by features of the speakers’ respective L1 forms and that the persistent problems the L2ers display with modality can be attributed to the multifunctionality of Turkish suffixes, which encompass tense, aspectual as well as modality uses. Furthermore, the learners prefer to attribute one meaning to each verbal suffix and this preference is the source of instability particularly evident in the modal uses of the suffixes we investigated. A final remark concerns native speakers’ low performance (below 90%) in some of the morphemes investigated, in particular, -(I)yor and -mIş, in both the written and the oral tasks. Although these findings are interesting and question current descriptions of these morphemes (particularly given that native speakers did not show any preference to employ -mIş in indirect speech), it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a discussion on this but remains open for further investigation.



Chapter 3.  The acquisition of TAM markers in L2 Turkish 103

More extensive investigations involving larger interlanguage samples along with a more detailed qualitative analysis of the data are certainly required to confirm and expand on the findings of the present study.

Acknowledgements We are grateful to all our participants for their time and their valuable contribution. We also thank Ayşe Gürel for her valuable comments on the paper and her continuous support. We further thank two anonymous reviewers for their insightful suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript. As always all errors remain ours.

References Aikhenvald, A. 2004. Evidentiality. Oxford: OUP. Aksu-Koç, A. 1988. The Acquisition of Aspect and Modality: The Case of Past Reference in Turkish. Cambridge: CUP. doi: 10.1017/CBO9780511554353 Andersen, R. W. 1991. Developmental sequences: The emergence of aspect marking in second language acquisition. In Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 2], T. Huebner & C.A. Ferguson (eds), 305–324. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/lald.2.17and Andersen, R. W. & Shirai, Y. 1994. Discourse motivations for some cognitive acquisition principles. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16(2): 133–156.  doi:  10.1017/S0272263100012845

Andersen, R.W. & Shirai, Y. 1996. The primacy of aspect in first and second language acquisition: the pidgin-creole connection. In Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (eds), 527–570. San Diego CA: Academic Press. Balcı, A. 2000. Grammatical categories. In Turkish Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, Z. Balpınar (ed.), 95–130. Eskişehir: Anadolu Üniversitesi Yayını. Bardovi-Harlig, K. 2013. Acquisition of tense and aspect. In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Second Language Acquisition, P. Robinson (ed.), 6–8. New York NY: Routledge. Bartning, I. 2003. ‘Je ne pense pas que ce soit vrai’ – le subjonctif un trait tardif dans l’acquisition du français L2. In Hommage à Jane Nystedt, M. Metzeltin (ed.), 31–49. Wien: Drei Eidechsen. Bybee, J., Perkins, R. & Pagliuca, W. 1994. The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Clairis, C. & Babiniotis, G. 1999. Γραμματική της Νέας Ελληνικής (Δομολειτουργική – Επικοινωνιακή) τ. ΙΙ: Το Ρήμα της Νέας Ελληνικής: η Οργάνωση του Μηνύματος (Modern Greek Grammar: Structural, Functional and Communicative, II: The Verb: the Organization of the Message). Athens: Ellinika Grammata. Comrie, B. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: CUP.

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Dittmar, N. & Terborg, H. 1991. Modality and second language learning. In Crosscurrents in Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theories [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 2], T. Huebner & C. Ferguson (eds), 347–383. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  doi:  10.1075/lald.2.19dit

Efstathiadi, L. 2010. The use of epistemic markers as a means of hedging and boosting in the discourse of L1 and L2 speakers of Modern Greek: A corpus-based study in informal letter-writing. Themes in Science and Technology Education 3: 181–206. Erguvanlı-Taylan, E. 1996. On the parameter of aspect in Turkish. In Modern Studies in Turkish Linguistics: Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, A. Konrot (ed.), 153–168. Eskişehir: Anadolu University. Erguvanlı-Taylan, E. 1997. Türkçede görünüş, zaman ve kiplik ilişkisi: {-DI} biçimbirimi. XI. Dilbilim Kurultayı: Bildiriler, 1–11. Erguvanlı-Taylan, E. 2001. On the relation between temporal/aspectual adverbs and the verb form in Turkish. In The Verb in Turkish [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 44], E. Erguvanlı-­Taylan (ed.), 97–128. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/la.44.05tay Erguvanlı-Taylan, E. & Özsoy, S. 1993. Türkçedeki bazı kiplik biçimlerinin öğretimi üzerine. VII. Dilbilim Kurultayı Bildirileri, 1–9. doi: 10.1075/la.44.05tay Erlam, R. 2006. Elicited imitation as a measure of L2 implicit knowledge: An empirical validation study. Applied Linguistics 27: 464–491. doi: 10.1093/applin/aml001 Erlam, R. 2009. The elicited oral imitation test as a measure of implicit knowledge. In Implicit and Explicit Knowledge in Second Language Learning, Testing, and Teaching, R. Ellis, S. Loewen, C. Edler, R. Erlam, J. Philp & H. Reinders (eds), 65–93. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Gallimore, R. & Tharp, R. G. 1981. The interpretation of elicited sentence imitation in a standardized context. Language Learning 31(2): 369–392. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-1770.1981.tb01390.x Giacalone Ramat, A. 1992. Grammaticalization processes in the area of temporal and modal relations. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 14: 297–322.  doi:  10.1017/S027226310001113X

Göksel, A. & Kerslake, C. 2005. Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar. London: Routledge.  doi:  10.4324/9780203340769

Güven, M. 2006. Adverbials in Turkish: The Third Parameter in Aspectual Interpretation. Munich: Lincom. Harley, B. 1992. Patterns of second language development in French immersion. Journal of French Language Studies 2: 159–183. doi: 10.1017/S0959269500001289 Holton, D., Mackridge, P. & Philippaki-Warburton, I. 1997. Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language. London: Routledge. Howard, M. 2008. Morphosyntactic development in the expression of modality: The subjunctive in French L2 acquisition. Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics 11: 171–192. Iakovou, M. 1999. Τροπικές Κατηγορίες στο Ρηµατικό Σύστηµα της Νέας Ελληνικής (Modal categories in the verbal system of Modern Greek). PhD Dissertation, University of Athens. Ifantidou, E. 2001. Evidentials and Relevance [Pragmatics and Beyond New Series 86]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/pbns.86 Joseph, B. D. & Philippaki-Warburton, I. 1987. Modern Greek. London: Croom Helm.



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Κaili, H. 2008. Πόσο διαρκεί ο χρόνος διαρκείας της Τουρκικής; Μια προσπάθεια επαναπροσδιορισμού του Geniş Zaman (How long does the Aorist of Turkish last? An attempt to redefine Geniş Zaman). In Languages for Intercultural Dialogue, J. Burston, E. Gavriel, M. Monville-Burston & P. Pavlou (eds), 75–85. Nicosia: Representation of the European Union in Cyprus. Kaili, H. & Çeltek, A. 2011. The Puzzling Case of Geniş Zaman for the Greek-speaking learners of Turkish. In Theoretical and Applied Researches on Turkish Language Teaching, L. Uzun & Ü. Bozkurt (eds), 545–557. Εssen: Die Blaue Eule. Kaili, H. & Çeltek, A. 2012. On the teaching of -mIş to foreign learners of Turkish. Dilbilim Araştırmaları 2012/2: 1–20. Mozer, A. 1994. Ποιόν και απόψεις του ρήματος (Aktionsart and Aspects of the Verb). Athens: Parousia. Papadopoulou, D., Varlokosta, S., Spyropoulos, V., Kaili, H., Prokou, S. & Revithiadou, A. 2011. Case morphology and word order in L2 Turkish: Evidence from Greek learners. Second Language Research 27 (2): 173–205. doi: 10.1177/0267658310376348 Plungian, V. A. 2001. The place of evidentiality within the universal grammatical space. Journal of Pragmatics 33(3): 349–357. doi: 10.1016/S0378-2166(00)00006-0 Ralli, A. 2005. Μορφολογία (Morphology). Athens: Patakis. Rosch, E. H. 1973. On the internal structure of perceptual and semantic categories. In Cognitive Development and the Acquisition of Language, T.E. Moore (ed.), 111–144. New York NY: Academic Press. Roussou, A. 1999. Modals and the subjunctive. In Studies in Greek Syntax, A. Alexiadou, G. Horrocks & M. Stavrou (eds), 169–183. Dordrecht: Kluwer.  doi:  10.1007/978-94-015-9177-5_9

Setatos, M. 1994a. Επιχειρηματολογικές χρήσεις πραγματολογικών μορίων στην κοινή νεοελληνική (Argumentative Uses of Pragmatic Particles in Standard Modern Greek). In Γλωσσολογικές Μελέτες (Linguistic Studies), M. Setatos (ed.), 127–146. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Setatos, M. 1994b. Επιχειρηματολογικές χρήσεις του λέγω (Argumentative uses of lego). In Γλωσσολογικές Μελέτες (Linguistic Studies), M. Setatos (ed.), 147–166. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Shirai, Y. & Andersen, R. W. 1995. The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: A prototype account. Language 71(4): 743–762. doi: 10.2307/415743 Temürcü, C. 2007. A Semantic Framework for Analyzing Tense, Aspect and Mood: An Application to the Ranges of Polysemy of -Xr, -DIr, -Iyor and -Ø in Turkish. PhD dissertation, University of Antwerp. Terrell, T., Baycroft, B. & Perrone, C. 1987. The subjunctive in Spanish interlanguage: Accuracy and comprehensibility. In Foreign Language Learning: A Research Perspective, B. Van­ Patten, T. R. Dvorak & J. Lee (eds), 23–48. Cambridge: CUP. Tsangalidis, A. 1999. WILL and THA: A Comparative Study of the Category Future. Thessalo­ niki: University Studio Press. Tsangalidis, A. 2001. Κριτήρια τροπικότητας: η κατηγορία των τροπικών μορίων στα νέα ελληνικά (Criteria for modality: the category of modal particles in Modern Greek). In Μελέτες για την ελληνική γλώσσα (Studies for the Greek Language) 21: 759–770. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.

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Tsangalidis, A. 2003. Kριτήρια τροπικότητας ΙΙ: η κατηγορία των τροπικών (ημι)βοηθητικών ρημάτων στη νέα ελληνική (Criteria for modality II: the category of modal (semi)auxiliary verbs in Modern Greek). In Μελέτες για την ελληνική γλώσσα (Studies for the Greek Language) 23: 733–744. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Tsangalidis, A. 2004. Unidirectionality in the grammaticalization of modality in Greek. In Up and Down the Cline – The Nature of Grammaticalization [Typological Studies in Language 59], Ο. Fischer, M. Norde & H. Perridon (eds), 193–209. Αmsterdam: John Benjamins.  doi:  10.1075/tsl.59.10tsa

Tsangalidis, A. 2009. Modals in Greek. In Modals in the Languages of Europe: A Reference Work, B. Hansen & F. De Haan (eds), 139–163. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Tsangalidis, A. 2012. Evidentiality and modality: Evidence from emerging evidentials in Greek. Paper presented at the Conference ‘The Nature of Evidentiality’, 14–16 June, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Veloudis, G. 1985. Η δήλωση του χρόνου στα να- συμπληρώματα (The denotation of tense in na complements in Greek). In Μελέτες για την ελληνική γλώσσα (Studies for the Greek Language), 183–198. Thessaloniki: Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Veloudis, G. 2001. Νά και να (Ná and na). In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Greek Linguistics, G. Aggouraki, A. Arvaniti, J. Davy, D. Goutsos, M. Karyolemou, A. Panayiotou, A. Papapavlou, P. Pavlou & A. Roussou (eds), 243–250. Thessaloniki: University Studio Press. Weitze, M., McGhee, J., Graham, R. C., Dewey, D. P., & Eggett, D. L. 2011. Variability in L2 acquisition across L1 backgrounds. In Selected Proceedings of the 2009 Second Language Research Forum, L. Plonsky & M. Schierloh (eds), 152–163. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Yavaş, F. 1980. Οn the Meaning of the Tense and Aspect Markers in Turkish. PhD dissertation, University of Kansas.

Chapter 4

The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish under the Feature Reassembly Approach Silvina Montrul

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

According to the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere 2009), L2 learners must acquire, reassembly, or reconfigure features into lexical items in the L2 from the way represented and bundled in their L1. This study extends this approach to the acquisition of two classes of causative verbs – change of state verbs with agentive subjects (kırmak-break) and psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects (korkutmak-frighten) in L2 Turkish by L1 speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese. The results of a picture judgment task with transitive and intransitive sentences manipulating overt/non-overt morphology on the verbs showed that the L2 learners’ judgments were constrained by the morphological patterns of the learners’ L1s, experiencing different degrees of difficulty with the lexical realization of those features. Keywords: Turkish, causative morphology, Feature Reassembly Hypothesis

1. Introduction Among the different components of linguistic knowledge, morphology is perhaps the most fragile during second language (L2) grammatical development, not only initially (Bailey, Madden & Krashen 1974; Slabakova 2008) but also in ultimate attainment (Lardiere 2007). During the course of L2 development some functional morphology is not processed in a decompositional form (Clahsen, Blakhair, Schutter & Cunnings 2013), or not processed at all (De Keyser 1997; VanPatten 1996). Variability in the production of inflectional morphology – such as omission of tense and agreement – is common (Lardiere 2007; Morales 2014). These problems arise as well with derivational and argument structure-changing morphology (Friedline 2011; Jiang 2002), which can also be selectively overgeneralized (Oshita 2000; Toth 2000) or even erroneously spelled out (Lardiere & Schwartz 1997). doi 10.1075/lald.59.05mon © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

108 Silvina Montrul

Two questions that arise are whether and how the relationship between the morphological characteristics of the first language (L1) and the L2 contribute to the potential learning problem during interlanguage development. Typologically, there are different morphological systems, and languages can be characterized as more or less morphologically richer than others. In synthetic languages like English, a word can consist of a root and inflectional morphemes as suffixes (e.g. car singular, cars plural). In isolating, analytic languages like Yoruba (e.g. eku púpò̟ “rat many”) each word is a morpheme and words are not inflected. Agglutinative and polysynthetic languages, like Turkish and Inuttitut, combine several morphemes into one word (e.g. Turkish evdekiler “the people in the house”, Inuttitut tusaatsiarunnanngittualuujunga “I can’t hear very well”). Even within synthetic languages, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hindi are considered more morphologically richer than others, for example, English (Legate & Yang 2007). In terms of derivational morphology, English is poorer than Spanish or Turkish because it exhibits substantial zero-derivation (when the phonological spell out of formal and semantic features is Ø). It has been claimed that the morphology of morphologically impoverished languages is more difficult to acquire for L1 and L2 learners than the morphology of richly inflected languages, causing delay and possible fossilization in adult L2 acquisition (Legate & Yang 2007; Morales 2014). Would a language like Turkish be easier to acquire, then? This study investigates whether the morphological characteristics of the L1 play a role in the acquisition of Turkish as a L2 by native speakers of Spanish, English and Japanese. The focus is on argument structure-changing morphology, which is expressed differently in the four languages under consideration. Studies on English causative psych verbs like frighten have found that L2 learners with Chinese, Malagasy, Japanese, Spanish and French as L1s have difficulty realizing that these verbs have a zero-causative morpheme (Chen 1996; White et al. 1998). Montrul (1999a, b, 2000a, b, 2001a, b) confirmed difficulties with zero-derived causative change of state verbs (break, melt) in L2 English by Spanish- and Turkish-speaking L1 learners as well. Unlike English, Turkish has overt causative morphology, and the prediction is that acquiring causative verbs in Turkish should perhaps be easy for L2 learners in general. At the same time, the presence or absence of overt morphology in the learners’ L1 can play a role in the degree of L1 transfer and successful acquisition of the causative morpheme in the L2. If L2 learners have problems analyzing and reconfiguring the morphology of these verbs because they do not decompose morphology like native speakers, then acquiring Turkish will not be so straightforward for everybody. To verify these possibilities, this study focuses on the L2 acquisition of the morphological patterns of two types of causative verbs in Turkish by native speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese. The first type includes verbs that denote a physical change of state and



Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 109

have agentive subjects (break, melt). The second type are psychological change of state verbs with experiencer objects (frighten, bore). The four languages implicated in this study – Turkish, Spanish, English and Japanese – vary in how they express the causative/inchoative alternation morphologically on the verb, and the direction of the derivation. The L2 Turkish data reported here is a subset of the crosslinguistic data involving L2 English, L2 Spanish, and L2 Turkish published in Montrul (2001a), but the findings about L1 influence are considered within Lardiere’s (2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis.1 This study makes a contribution to the L2 acquisition of Turkish and to the L2 acquisition of derivational morphology. The results confirm that the L2 learners acquire the causative morphology of Turkish but are also constrained by the way overt and non-overt causative or anticausative morphology is realized in the learners’ respective L1s. As a result, English speakers accept more errors than Spanish and Japanese speakers. 2. Causative verbs in Turkish Turkish causative verbs like batmak “sink” and korkutmak “frighten” that denote a change of state, appear in transitive and intransitive configurations, and present particular semantic and morphological properties. The intransitive form (1a, 2a) is basic and the transitive form (1b, 2b) is derived through the addition of causative morphology (Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kornfilt 1997; Underhill 1976). The causative suffix -DIr or any of its allomorphs attaches to the verb root to form the causative form. (1) a. Gemi bat-mış. ship sink-past ‘The ship sank.’ b. Düşman gemi-yi bat-ır-mış. enemy ship-acc sink-caus-past ‘The enemy sank the ship/made the ship sink.’

1. At the request of the editors of the volume and with permission from SAGE, this chapter is a shorter version of Montrul, S. 2001. L1-constrained variability in the L2 acquisition of argument structure-changing morphology with causative verbs. Second Language Research 17, 2, 144–194. This chapter focuses only on the Turkish study. Some sections have been rewritten to update the theoretical framework and the literature on the causative/inchoative alternation, but the method and the results section, including Table 1 and Table 7, and the statistical analyses are from the original article.

110 Silvina Montrul

(2) a. Avcı kork-muş hunter fear-past ‘The hunter got frightened.’ b. Arslan avcı-yı kork-ut-muş lion hunter-acc fear-caus-past ‘The lion frightened the hunter.’

At the lexico-syntactic level, causative verbs have a complex event structure. The transitive form is an accomplishment (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995), where the upper event introduces the cause predicate and the lower event represents the change of state leading to a result (3a). Under some analyses of English, the intransitive form of change of state verbs is derived from the transitive form by a process of detransitivization and is unaccusative (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995). Other aspectual analyses (Dowty 1979; Verkuyl 1993) make a finer distinction between change of state that can be transitive; differentiating between accomplishments, which involve a process, and achievements, which are punctual (such as find). (3) a. The thief broke the window [x cause [y become broken]] b. The window broke [y become broken]

The variable x stands for the agent argument, while y stands for the theme/patient. In the transitive form, the agent maps to subject position and the theme to object position. When there is no agent present, as in the intransitive (inchoative) form (3b), the sole argument y maps to subject position. Object-experiencer psych verbs like frighten are a subclass of change of state verbs that describe the bringing about of a change in a psychological or emotional state. (4) The lion frightened the hunter. [x cause [y become frightened]]

According to many analyses frighten-type verbs are causative in their transitive form (Grimshaw 1990; Levin 1993; Pesetsky 1995), but differ from physical change of state verbs in their thematic role composition and in the linking of arguments to syntactic positions. Psychological verbs subcategorize for a theme (or stimulus) (x) that causes the mental state, and an experiencer (y), the recipient of the state. In contrast with physical change of state verbs, which have agentive subjects, psych verbs exhibit a misalignment problem because the semantically most prominent role (experiencer) is in the object position, while the causer is the theme and takes the subject position. Their argument structure characteristics are linked to these verbs’ peculiar syntactic behavior (Grimshaw 1990; Pesetsky 1995), and present great difficulty to L2 learners (White et al. 1998).



Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish

Languages differ greatly in their ways of expressing the relationship between the transitive and intransitive forms of these causative verbs with a common lexical meaning (change of state). Haspelmath (1993) distinguishes three main morphological patterns: causative, anticausative and “non-directed” alternations. Non-directed alternations are further subdivided into “labile”, “equipollent” and “suppletive.” The Turkish verbs batmak and korkmak illustrate the causative alternation, because the causative morpheme is added to the intransitive form, as shown in (1) and (2). The anticausative alternation is the opposite of the causative pattern: The transitive (causative) form is basic and the intransitive (inchoative) is derived. Some verbs in Turkish belong to this pattern (5b), as do most change of state verbs in the Romance languages, illustrated here with Spanish in (6b). In Turkish, the anticausative morpheme is -Il (or any of its allomorphs) and in Spanish, the anticausative form is the reflexive clitic se. In Turkish and in Spanish -Il and se are homophonous with the passive morpheme (Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kornfilt 1997; Underhill 1976). (5) a. Hırsız pencere-yi kır-dı thief window-acc break-past ‘The thief broke the window.’ b. Pencere kır-ıl-dı window break-pass-past ‘The window broke.’ (6) a. b.

El ladrón rompió la ventana. ‘The thief broke the window.’ La ventana se rompió. ‘The window broke.’

According to Haspelmath (1993), in non-directed alternations neither transitive nor intransitive forms are morphologically derived from each other. The labile pattern, which has non-overt morphology in the two forms, is the most common pattern in English, as given in (3). In contrast, equipollent alternations have overt morphology in the transitive (causative) and intransitive (inchoative) forms: both forms have the same lexical stem, but are expressed by different affixes. This pattern is common in Japanese (examples from Hirakawa 1995): (7) a. John-ga kabin-o kowa-si-ta nom vase-acc break-trans-past ‘John broke the vase.’ b. Kabin-ga kowa-re-ta vase-nom break-intr-past ‘The vase broke.’

111

112 Silvina Montrul

Finally, in suppletive alternations, different verb roots are used. Most languages have a few verbs that fit this pattern, such as kill-die in English, matar-morir ‘kill-die’ in Spanish, yanmak/yakmak ‘burn’ in Turkish and sin-u/koros-u ‘burn’ in Japanese. In most languages, object-experiencer psych verbs can appear in transitive or intransitive form, although in English only a few verbs do so (worry, gladden) (Levin 1993). With most verbs, however, the intransitive form is expressed periphrastically with the verb get, as in (8c). (8) a. The lion frightened the hunter. b.  *The hunter frightened. c. The hunter got frightened.

The verb get in English can also have a causative meaning. The intransitive form is usually referred to as the passive get. However, Haegeman (1985) considers that get, as in (8), has an inchoative change of state meaning and is not a passive, as in (8). (9) a. John got his feet wet. b. His feet got wet.

In Spanish, morphologically speaking, psych verbs and agentive change of state verbs conform to the anticausative pattern. As with agentive verbs, the reflexive clitic is obligatory in the intransitive form, as in (10b). (10) a. El león asustó al cazador. the lion frightened DOM2 the hunter “The lion frightened the hunter.” b. El cazador se asustó. the hunter refl frightened “The hunter got frightened.” c. *El cazador asustó. the hunter frightened “The hunter frightened.”

In both Spanish and English transitive psych verbs can be paraphrased with the periphrastic causative verbs hacer (11a) and make (11b), respectively, except that in Spanish hacer ‘make’ subcategorizes for an infinitive and in English make subcategorizes for an adjective. Notice that the word order is also different in the two languages.

2. DOM stands for differential object marker.



Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 113

(11) a. El león hizo asustar(se) al cazador. The lion made frighten(refl) DOM the hunter b. The lion made the hunter frightened.

Although change of state verbs in Turkish belong to the causative or anticausative pattern, most change of state verbs in Japanese conform to the equipollent alternation. In the two languages psychological change of state verbs express the transitive form with an overt causative suffix, as in (12a) and (13a), while the intransitive form is morphologically simple, as in (12b) and (13b). (12) a. Lion-ga ryooshi-no kowagar-ase-ta lion-nom hunter-acc fear-caus-past ‘The lion frightened the hunter.’ b. Ryooshi-ga kowagatta hunter-nom frighten-past ‘The hunter got frightened.’

To summarize, causative verbs that express a change of state can appear in transitive and intransitive configurations crosslinguistically, but this alternation and the direction of the derivation are expressed differently in different languages. In Turkish, most verbs have the causative pattern (morphology on the transitive form) but many others have the anticausative pattern. The predominant morphological pattern in English is labile (no overt morphology); in Spanish it is anticausative (morphology on the intransitive); and in Japanese it is predominantly equipollent (overt morphology on transitive and intransitive forms). As for psych verbs with experiencer objects, in English and Spanish they have overt morphology on the intransitive form (anticausative pattern), while in Turkish and Japanese these verbs belong to the causative pattern. These facts are summarized in Table 1. In views of morphology subsumed under the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), such as Halle and Marantz’s (1993) Distributed Morphology or Beard’s (1995) Separation Hypothesis, the distinction between open class and closed class lexical items is represented by l-morphemes and f-morphemes. Traditional lexical categories (verbs, nouns, adjectives) are l-morphemes derived from categorically unspecified roots, which are supplied lexical category in the syntax. Morphemes have bundles of grammatical features and morphophonological forms. The concept of f-morpheme refers to a syntactic terminal node and its content (i.e. syntactico-­semantic abstract features drawn from the set made available by Universal Grammar) and not to the phonological expression of that terminal node. The phonological content of a vocabulary item may be any phonological string, including zero (or Ø). F-morphemes consist of abstract features and

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Table 1.  Typology of morphological derivations with change of state verbs and psych verbs (based on Haspelmath 1993) Morphological patterns Change of state verbs languages morphology example (tr.)  (intr.)

causative

anticausative

labile

equipollent

Turkish

Spanish Turkish – caus + anticaus romper romperse

English

Japanese

– caus – anticaus break break

+ caus + anticaus kowa-su kowa-reru

+ caus – anticaus kop-ar-mak kop-mak

kırmak kır-ıl-mak Psych verbs languages morphology example (tr.)  (intr.)

Turkish Japanese + caus – anticaus kork-ut-mak kork-mak

Spanish English – caus + anticaus asustar asustarse

kowagar-ase kowagar

frighten get frightened

Note: + = overt morphology, – = zero morphology.

morphophonological spell-outs, such that in Turkish, for example, the functional category TP has [±finite] and [±past] features, and with regular verbs, the [+finite, +past] (and evidential) features are morphologically expressed by the -mIş affix or any of its allomorphs.3 Phonological spell-outs, insertion of lexical items, and readjustment rules occur post-syntactically, at the level of Morphological Form (or MS). I assume that verbal adicity markers (causative and anticausative morphemes) are vocabulary items and their spell out is part of PF. For Marantz (1984) the anticausative affix that attaches to transitive roots is an f-morpheme that carries the abstract features [–logical subject] [–transitive], while the causative suffix attaching to the intransitive roots carries the features [+logical subject] [+transitive]. 3. Another past tense morpheme in Turkish is -DI, which I do not take to be an allomorph of -mIş. Both -DI and -mIş in Turkish are tense-aspect-modality/mood markers. -DI expresses +past, +perfective, +indicative, while -mIş expresses +past, +perfective and +evidential. Thus each one realizes a different set of features.

Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 115



Under Distributed Morphology (Harley & Noyer 2000; Marantz 1997) internal and external causation as theorized by Levin and Rappaport (1995) are properties of individual verbal roots (see also Reinhart 2002 and Chierchia 2004). Roots that surface as morphologically simple verbs in the intransitive form like Turkish kırmak “break”, are supposedly internally caused. Conversely, roots that have morphologically simple transitive/lexical causative forms like Turkish kapamak “close” are externally caused (Volpe 2005). However, this description is not entirely accurate because in Turkish kırmak “break” and kapamak “close” are in fact both externally caused, even if the direction of the derivation is the opposite. As Ramchand (2013) correctly points out, there is no reason to suppose that the direction of the morphological derivation in one language is the same for another. If one takes overt morphology to spell out sublexical structure more transparently, the direction could be argued to be from inchoative to transitive/causative in the case of languages with consistent causative morphology (e.g. Hindi/Urdu), and transitive/causative to inchoative in the case of Slavic and Romance languages, which have consistent inchoative morphology. Referring back to examples (1), (2) and (5), the basic roots in Turkish are inserted below the VP, moving to the heads of the CAUSE and/or BECOME predicates in the syntax. The causative morpheme is the head of CAUSE and the anticausative morpheme is the head of BECOME in Turkish. Thus, the verbal roots attach to the morphemes through morphological merge and vocabulary insertion in the syntax. 3. Previous studies In the monolingual acquisition of languages that express the causative/inchoative alternation overtly, errors with causative and (to a lesser extent) anticausative morphology are well documented (Allen 1996; Berman 1993). Children make systematic errors of omission or overgeneralization of the relevant morphology as documented in Inuttitut (Allen 1996), in Japanese (Morikawa 1991) and in Turkish (Aksu-Koç & Slobin 1985). For example, according to Aksu- Koç and Slobin, Turkish-acquiring children overapply the causative suffix to verbs that are already causative-transitive, as in example (13) with the verb kesmek ‘to cut’: (13) Child (2;3) *Ben kes -tir -di -m I cut caus past 1sg ‘I had someone cut it’ intended: kestim ‘I cut it’

Turkish children also add the causative morpheme to intransitive verbs that have a suppletive transitive counterpart (such as kill-die in English) and do not undergo

116 Silvina Montrul

the productive causative rule, as in (14), or use an intransitive form in a transitive context, as in (15). (14) Bu -ra -sı -nı -*yan -dır -ıyor this loc poss acc burn caus prog ‘It is making this point burn’ (15) Child: Şu -nu *kalk -sana that acc get up imp ‘Get that up.’

(The child’s intended meaning was ‘lift that up’, but he used the intransitive verb kalk ‘get up’. The grammatical form required the causative morpheme: kal-dır-sana.) As for the inchoative morpheme -Il, Aksu-Koç and Slobin (1985: 846) notice that it emerges early “to focus on desired change of state in objects.” Errors under marking the -Il suffix are documented with the present participle of adjectives, as in (16). ( 16)  *ısır-an elma (correct: ısır-ıl-an elma bite pres part apple bite-pass pres part apple) ‘Apple that is biting’ ‘Apple that was bitten’

Aksu-Koç and Slobin consider the possibility that these errors might stem from the “taxing operation of morphological derivation” but later conclude that they are due to insufficient analysis of certain predicates in terms of transitivity/intransitivity, as is also suggested by the errors of overcausativization. In general, errors with argument structure-changing morphology are taken to reflect misanalysis errors at the argument structure level (in the mapping of lexical information to syntactic information). Because there is no source of transfer from another language in L1 acquisition, morphological errors could indicate incorrect representation of features rather than failure to map features to morphophonological form at the level of morphological structure (MS), assuming Distributed Morphology. But can the same be assumed for L2 acquisition, where the L1 is assumed to influence interlanguage development? In L2 acquisition, change of state verbs have been investigated as part of the phenomenon of unaccusativity in general (Hirakawa 1995; Oshita 2000) and the causative/inchoative alternation (Montrul 2000b). Like L1 learners, adult L2 learners also overgeneralize the causative/inchoative alternation to verbs that do alternate in transitivity, even when the alternation has – syntactically speaking – a similar domain of application as in the learners’ respective L1s. A common finding among many of these studies is that L2 learners of a variety of L1 backgrounds



Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 117

produce and accept errors with intransitive (unaccusative) verbs in passive constructions, such as *My mother was died when I was just a baby (Zobl 1989: 204). Overgeneralization errors of this sort might reflect misanalysis at the argument structure level in the two acquisition situations, but errors with the morphology are certainly different in the two cases. Montrul (1999a, b) and Toth (1999) show that the errors of omission and overgeneralization observed in L2 acquisition are constrained by the morphological patterns of the learners’ L1s. They found that English-speaking learners of Spanish initially omit the reflexive morpheme in the intransitive form, accepting and producing errors like *La ventana rompió ‘The window broke’ instead of the correct form with the reflexive (La ventana se rompió). Montrul (2001b) shows that Spanish-speaking learners of English rejected zero derived forms (The window broke) and accepted inchoatives with periphrastic -get (The window got broken), which the native speakers found more marginally acceptable than inchoatives. Studies of causative psych verbs have been concerned with the acquisition of the peculiar argument structure (thematic) and syntactic properties of these verbs in L2 English (Chen 1996; Juffs 1996; White et al. 1998) and in L2 Spanish (Montrul 1998) but also report difficulties with the morphological properties of these verbs in English. Low proficiency learners whose L1s are Japanese, Chinese, Malagasy, Spanish and French had difficulties recognizing the zero-causative morpheme in English. To summarize, in L1 acquisition, errors of omission or addition of derivational morphology are considered to indicate misanalysis of the argument structure properties of the verbal roots. L2 learners also display errors with argument structure with change of state verbs and with psych verbs, but the errors appear to reflect problems with the ways in which the verbal adicity morphemes are spelled out in the L1 and in the target language. Following Slabakova (2008), the morphology creates difficulty – it is a bottleneck – when accessing and acquiring meaning in a L2. 4. The study This study addresses whether and how the morphological characteristics of the L1 contribute to the acquisition of the morphology of causative verbs in Turkish as a L2, assuming the theoretical distinction between abstract features and morphophonological spell-outs as two related components of the acquisition problem. Lardiere (2009) advanced the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis which incorporates the tenets of Distributed Morphology and of the Full Transfer/Full Access

118 Silvina Montrul

Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse 1996). Lardiere (2009: 175) reframed the morphological problem in adult L2 acquisition by stating that the task of L2 learners is to acquire, reassembly, or reconfigure abstract formal features into lexical items in the target language from the way they are represented and bundled in their L1. For example, the plural morpheme in English is -s, attaches to nouns, and expresses “more than one.” An English speaker learning Turkish will need to assemble the plurality feature onto the lexical material lEr and apply vowel harmony with the root. But an English speaker learning Chinese, will have to map plurality to other lexical material, such as quantifiers, because the plural morpheme -men in Chinese is subject to highly restrictive conditions involving quantifiers, classifiers, animacy and definiteness that do not exist in English. Similar problems with plurality arise when learning Korean as an L2 (Hwang & Lardiere 2013), because the conditions on when and how to use plural morphemes in Korean are quite different and much more complex than in English. This is why language-specific morphological differences in how features are assembled in lexical items present a significant learning problem for L2 acquirers. Even if the same subset of relevant features has been selected by the L1-L2 pair in question, learners must figure out how to reconfigure them into new specific lexical items in the target language. One of the greatest sources of difficulty may be transfer of the representations of how the same features are assembled in lexical items in the L1. The Feature Reassembly Hypothesis rests on the assumption that learners will look for morpholexical correspondences in the L2 that match those in the L1, presumably on the basis of semantic meaning or grammatical functions (the phonetic matrices will obviously differ). This study investigates the acquisition of causative and anticausative morphology with change of state verbs and psych verbs in L2 Turkish by learners whose native languages are Spanish, English, and Japanese. If acquiring overt morphology in general is easier than acquiring zero morphology, L2 learners, including English-­speaking learners, should be, overall, quite accurate with causative morphology in Turkish. At the same time, English-speaking learners of Turkish could incorrectly accept zero-derived forms in Turkish more than Japanese-speaking learners, whose languages have overt morphology with these verbs. Assuming Lardiere’s Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, L2 learners will be constrained by the linguistic structure of the L1 at initial and intermediate levels of development. L2 learners bring to the task an entrenched system of morphosyntactic features already assembled into lexical items, in this case the overt/zero morphemes associated with internally and externally caused roots in their native language. In the particular verbs we are investigating, the semantic features [–logical subject] [–transitive] assemble with the intransitive/anticausative morphology that attaches to transitive roots (Turkish -Il, Spanish se).The features [+logical

Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 119



subject] [+transitive] assemble with the causative morphology (DIr) that attaches to intransitive roots in Turkish. These formal features [±logical subject, ±transitive] are available in the learners’ L1s (in this study English, Spanish and Japanese) but they do not always have lexical material (overt morphology). For example, these features in English are expressed as zero morphology. Spanish only lexicalizes the [–logical subject] [–transitive] features on the reflexive clitic se, while Japanese assembles [–logical subject] [–transitive] to the intransitive morphemes (-er) and [+logical subject] [+transitive] to the causative morphology (-as, -sas) depending on the verb. Development occurs if learners are able to assemble the features they already possess from their L1 to new lexical material in the L2. Surface morphological errors would be constrained by the way the abstract features associated with causative or anticausative morphology are phonologically spelled out in the learners’ respective L1s. For example, if features are expressed with overt morphophonology in the L1 but with zero-morphology in the L2, L2 learners may tend to assemble the features to an overt morphophonological form specific to the L2 (a suppletion error); if features are expressed with zero-morphology in the L1 but with overt morphology in the L2, learners would assume, at least initially, that those features may not receive phonological content in the L2, either (an omission error). They would thus not map them onto phonological material in Turkish and accept ungrammatical zero-derived forms. In other words, assuming the tenets of Distributed Morphology subsumed in the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, the learners will be guided from the overt/nonovert spell-outs in their L1 to encode the morphosyntactic features of their representations in the L2. 4.1

Participants

Twenty Turkish native speakers (the control group) and 51 learners of Turkish as a L2 participated in the study. The L2 learners were adults taking Turkish at two institutions in Istanbul and included 18 native speakers of English, 24 native speakers of Spanish, and 9 native speakers of Japanese. Some of the learners were actually living in Istanbul and others were international students taking Turkish lessons there. Their mean age and mean age of first exposure are illustrated in Table 2. A written cloze test was created to assess proficiency in Turkish for all the learners. The test consisted of a one-page paragraph with 28 blanks every 7th word. The task was graded on an exact word criterion, which means that the participants had to provide the exact word of the original test in order to receive 1 point for each correct answer. Therefore, the scores of the native speakers are quite low as

120 Silvina Montrul

Table 2.  Participants’ information Participants Turkish speakers (n = 18) Spanish speakers (n = 24) English speakers (n = 18) Japanese speakers (n = 9)

Mean age

Range

Mean age of first L2 exposure

Range of first L2 exposure

28.61 31.57 31.05 25.67

21–52 27–36 20–55 20–29

– 26.85 27.50 23.54

– 24–31 20–43 20–25

Table 3.  Turkish cloze test: Mean percentage accuracy scores Group

N

Mean

SD

Range

Proficiency

Turkish English Japanese Spanish Spanish

18 18  9 14 10

51.38 20.82 22.34 21.16 34.28

4.76 4.11 4.04 4.53 3.01

42–57 14–28 18–30 17–28 32–39

Native speakers Intermediate Intermediate Intermediate High-intermediate

well because there are other grammatical options for the blanks.4 The results of the cloze test are given in Table 3 in mean percentage accuracy scores. Based on the overall scores, the English-speaking group and the Japanese speakers were classified as intermediate, while the Spanish-speaking group was split into two different levels: intermediate and high-intermediate, and these divisions were confirmed by statistical analyses. There were significant differences between the control group and the three groups of learners (ANOVA F(4,65) = 188.45 , p < 0.0001; Tukey, p < 0.0001). The Spanish, English and Japanese intermediate groups were not significantly different from each other, but the three groups were significantly different from the high-intermediate Spanish group.

4. Brown (1980) compared L2 learners’ performance on English cloze tests on the basis of whether the test was scored using exact answers (i.e., the words that had been removed from the text), acceptable answers (i.e., alternative words that were judged to be acceptable in the lexical, morphosyntactic, and discourse context of the deleted words), or multiple-choice answers. He found that all three scoring methods yielded internally consistent cloze test results that could discriminate among L2 learners, with reliability estimates ranging from .82 to .95 – assessed with both the split-half reliability estimate and the Kuder Richardson 20 (KR-20) reliability estimate.

Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 121



4.2

Experimental task

A picture judgment task was designed to test whether learners knew the transitivity and morphological form of the 11 target verbs (6 causative/inchoative and 5 psych verbs). The change of state verbs used were kırmak ‘break’, açmak ‘open’ and kapamak ‘close’ from the anticausative pattern, and batmak ‘sink’, erimek ‘melt’, ölmek ‘die’ from the causative pattern. The psych verbs used were korkutmak ‘frighten’, kızdırmak ‘anger’, eğlendirmek ‘amuse’, sevindirmek ‘please’, şaşırmak ‘confuse’. The task consisted of pictures and pairs of sentences. There were two pictures per verb: one picture illustrated the verb in a transitive situation, where an agent was doing something to a person or an object, and the other one presented the change of state or result, where only one participant was portrayed (see Figures 1 and 2). Participants saw a total of 83 pictures in random order assembled in a booklet (only 22 pairs are relevant to the results of this study). Each picture was accompanied by a pair of sentences, presented in a separate answer sheet. Next to each sentence in the pair there was a scale ranging from –3 (completely unnatural) to 3 (completely natural). Zero responses in the middle of the scale were meant to indicate “I don’t know.” These were eliminated from the analysis. All transitive pictures were accompanied by transitive sentences and all intransitive pictures by intransitive sentences. The task manipulated the morphological and syntactic form of each verb. Figures 1 and 2 show representative examples with the verbs break and frighten. Depending on the verb, sometimes the two sentences were appropriate, in other cases one sentence was appropriate and the other was not, and yet in other cases both sentences were either ungrammatical or grammatical but semantically inappropriate in the context provided by the picture. Participants were asked to judge both the meaning of the sentences and their grammatical correctness in the same test, depending on the form of the verb. Examples of sentence pairs used in the picture judgment task are shown in (17) to (22).

Figure 1.  Break

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Figure 2.  Frighten

Causative pattern Translation (17) Gemi batmış. ‘The boat sank’  *Gemi batılmış. ‘The boat sank’ (18) Düşman gemiyi batırmış. ‘The enemy sank the boat’  *Düşman gemiyi batmış. ‘The enemy sank the boat’ Anticausative pattern (19) Hırsız pencereyi kırdı ‘The thief broke the window’  *Hırsız pencereyi kırırdı ‘The thief broke the window’ (20) Pencere kırıldı ‘The window broke’  *Pencere kırdı ‘The window broke’ Psych verbs (21) Arslan avcıyı korkutmuş ‘The lion frightened the hunter’  *Arslan avcıyı korkmuş ‘The lion frightened the hunter’ (22) Avcı korkmuş ‘The hunter got frightened’  *Avcı korkulmuş ‘The hunter got frightened’

The following specific predictions were formulated for the two types of verbs based on the morphological make up of said verbs in English, Spanish and Japanese.

Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 123



Change of state verbs: The Spanish speakers will be more accurate with verbs of the anticausative pattern than with verbs of the causative pattern because Spanish and Turkish share the anticausative pattern. However, with verbs of the causative pattern, Spanish speakers may incorrectly accept forms with anticausative morphology (-Il) assuming their equivalence with Spanish se for those verbs as well. The English speakers will be equally accurate or inaccurate with verbs of the two morphological patterns, but will tend to accept incorrect zero-derived transitive and intransitive forms. The Japanese learners are expected to be quite inaccurate with change of state verbs because the equivalent translations of the verbs used in the test have different morphology in Japanese (break is anticausative, open and sink are causative, close and melt are equipollent, die is suppletive). Psych verbs: Spanish and English speakers are expected to behave alike, rejecting psych verbs with causative morphology and accepting intransitive forms with anticausative morphology. The Japanese speakers will be more accurate than the Spanish and English speakers with psych verbs, transferring the causative morphological pattern from their L1.

A vocabulary translation task was used to ascertain the learners’ knowledge of individual Turkish verbs before they were ready to judge them in a given grammatical context. The rationale behind this task was that if a learner does not know the basic meaning of a verb, then he or she might not know its syntactic behavior or its transitivity status. A list of 41 verbs was presented in random order (30 of which are not relevant to the study presented here) for the learners to translate into their native language. The verbs were presented in their infinitive form. All those verbs that were unknown to individual learners were excluded from subsequent analyses of their results in the main task. Thus, results on particular verbs are based on those subjects who gave an accurate translation in the Vocabulary Translation Task. 4.3

Results

A factorial ANOVA with repeated measures was conducted with each verb type and verb form: causative verbs, anticausative verbs and psych verbs. The between subjects variable had four levels (Turkish, English, Spanish, Japanese), and the within subjects variable was grammaticality with two levels (grammatical, ungrammatical).

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Table 4.  Mean acceptability ratings of causative change of state verbs (3 = perfectly natural, –3 = strictly unnatural) Group

N

Transitive + -DIr Transitive bat-ır-mak *bat-mak

Inchoative bat-mak

Inchoative + -Il *bat-ıl-mak

Turkish NS English-I Japanese-I Spanish-I Spanish-H

18 18  9 14 10

2.88 (.33) 2.26 (.80) 1.08 (1.72) 2.4 (.16) 2.73 (.57)

2.67 (.68) 1.66 (1.18) 1.88 (.93) 1.75 (.93) 1.8 (.97)

–2.83 (.38) –0.31 (1.56) –0.28 (1) –0.44 (1.63) –0.74 (1.21)

–2.93 (.28) –1.2 (1.93) –0.86 (2.12) –1.35 (1.75) –2.44 (.89)

Table 5.  Mean and standard deviations with intransitive change of state verbs (3 = perfectly natural, –3 = strictly unnatural) Group

N

Transitive + -DIr Transitive *kır-dır-mak kır-mak

Inchoative *kır-mak

Inchoative + -Il kır-ıl-mak

Turkish NS English-I Japanese-I Spanish-I Spanish-H

18 18  9 14 10

–2.61 (.84) –0.98 (1.86) –2.27 (1.07) –1.58 (1.84) –3 (0)

–2.96 (.15) –0.22 (2.24) –1.4 (1.86) –1.95 (1.86) –1.8 (1.68)

3 (0) 1.44 (2.11) 2.57 (.67) 2.76 (.47) 2.6 (.84)

2.77 (.64) 2.14 (.95) 2.47 (1.05) 2.85 (.24) 3 (0)

Table 4 presents the means for change of state verbs of the causative pattern (bat-ır-mak ‘sink’ tr. / bat-mak ‘sink’ intr.). For this ANOVA, there was a main effect for group and for grammaticality, and a significant group by grammaticality interaction, which was followed up with individual ANOVAs. The results of transitive forms with the causative morpheme (bat-ır-mak ‘sink’) showed significant differences among groups (F(4,64) = 4.952, p < 0.002), mainly because the Japanese speakers rated these sentences significantly less acceptable than the other groups (Tukey, p < 0.001). Results of the ungrammatical zero-derived transitive forms were also different among groups (F(4,64) = 5.128, p < 0.001). In this case, the three intermediate groups (Spanish, English and Japanese) were more inaccurate than the control group and the high-intermediate Spanish group at rejecting these forms. Results of grammatical zero-derived inchoative forms (*bat-mak ‘sink’) were also statistically different between the control group and all the learners (F(4,64) = 3.375, p < 0.014), and so were the results of ungrammatical forms with intransitive (anticausative) morphology (*bat-ılmak) (F(4,64) = 12.716, p < 0.0001). Results of change of state verbs of the anticausative pattern (kır-mak ‘break’ tr. kır-ıl-mak ‘break’ intr.) are displayed in Table 5.

Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 125



Table 6.  Mean and standard deviations for psych verbs (3 = perfectly natural, –3 = strictly unnatural) Group

N

Transitive *kork-mak

Transitive + DIr kork-ut-mak

Intransitive kork-mak

Intransitive + -Il *kork-ul-mak

Turkish NS English-I Japanese-I Spanish-I Spanish-HI

18 18  9 14 10

–2.7 (.53) –0.51 (2.25) –2.26 (.93) –0.56 (1.92) –2.44 (1.18)

2.91 (.29) 1.84 (1.55) 2.33 (.82) 1.86 (1.02) 2.49 (1)

2.74 (.65) 2.38 (.71) 2.46 (.55) 2.42 (.82) 2.75 (.47)

–2.88 (.30) –0.48 (2.33) –1.8 (.79) –0.79 (2.27) –1.79 (1.45)

Mean acceptability ratings of ungrammatical transitive forms with causative morphology (*kır-dır-mak) were statistically significant (F(4,64) = 4.825, p < 0.002), largely due to the responses of the English and Spanish intermediate groups who assigned higher acceptability ratings than the Turkish native speakers, the Japanese, and the high-intermediate Spanish groups (Tukey, p < 0.007). Although all groups were quite accurate with grammatical zero-derived transitive forms, there were significant differences among groups due to the performance of the English speakers, who rated these forms lower on the scale than the other groups (F(4,64) = 3.744, p < 0.008). Results of intransitive sentences with and without the suffix -Il were also significant (F(4,64) = 6.479, p < 0.002 and F(4,64) = 6.398, p < 0.0001, respectively) due to the performance of the English speakers, who were more inaccurate than the other groups. Table 6 displays the results of psych verbs, which belong to the causative pattern in Turkish (kork-ut-mak ‘frighten’, kork-mak ‘get frightened’). The Spanish and English intermediate learners were quite accepting of ungrammatical zero-derived transitive forms (*kork-mak), unlike the Japanese and high-­intermediate Spanish speakers and the Turkish native speakers (F(4,64) = 6.985, p < 0.0001), suggesting that the intermediate English and Spanish learners transfer their L1 morphological patterns. Although the results of correct forms with causative morphology (kork-ut-mak) were also statistically significant (F(4,64) = 3.065, p < 0.028), the English and Spanish intermediate groups were more accurate at accepting grammatical forms than at rejecting ungrammatical forms. As for intransitive psych verbs (kork-mak), all learner groups assigned similar acceptability ratings and did not differ from the Turkish native speakers (F(4,64) = 1.038, p < 0.394). By contrast, the mean for incorrect forms with anticausative morphology (*kork-ul-mak) was statistically significant (F(4,64) = 5.293, p < 0.0001), largely due to the performance of the intermediate Spanish and English groups, who accepted these forms more than the other groups.

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Table 7.  Participants who scored below 70% accuracy with each sentence type and verb form Turkish NS n = 18

English-I n = 18

Japanese-I n=9

Spanish-I n = 14

Spanish-HI n = 10

%

count

%

count

%

count

%

count

%

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

5 0 4 8

27.7 0 22.2 44.4

4 4 0 1

44.4 44.4 0 11.1

4 0 1 3

28.57 0  7.1 21.4

0 0 0 6

 0  0  0 60

transitive *transitive + DIr *inchoative inchoative + -Il

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

0 6 8 4

0 33.3 44.4 22.2

0 0 2 0

0 0 22.2 0

0 3 2 0

0 21.4 14.2 0

0 0 0 0

 0  0 v0  0

*transitive transitive + DIr intransitive *intransitive + -Il

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

7 2 0 8

38.8 11.1 0 44.4

0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0

5 1 0 5

35.7  7.1 0 35.5

1 0 0 2

10  0  0 20

anticaus.

causative

count Change of state *transitive transitive + DIr inchoative *inchoative + -Il

causative

Psych

The group results were followed up by an individual subjects’ analysis by transforming the acceptability ratings to grammaticality scores in terms of accuracy. For example, scores between 1–3 to grammatical sentences and between –1 and –3 to ungrammatical sentences were converted to an accuracy score of 1. Positive ratings for ungrammatical sentences and negative ratings for grammatical sentences were converted to an accuracy score of 0. Calculated in this way, the individual results presented in Table 7, show that while a few learners in each language group had difficulty with the overt morphology of Turkish, difficulties affected the English learners the most with the three verb classes. All the Japanese speakers were very accurate with psych verbs, as predicted, but a few had some problems with change of state verbs, perhaps due to the fact that change of state verbs in Japanese come in a variety of morphological patterns. Finally, a few participants in the intermediate Spanish group have more problems with the ungrammatical forms of change of state verbs of the two morphological patterns, while 60% of high-intermediate learners only have problems with incorrect morphology of inchoative forms (*bat-ıl-mak, *kork-ul-mak), which suggests transfer from the Spanish anticausative pattern.



Chapter 4.  The causative/inchoative morphology in L2 Turkish 127

5. Discussion This study investigated potential morphological errors with transitive and intransitive (causative and anticausative) in L2 Turkish. Assuming the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, it was hypothesized that surface morphological errors would be constrained by the way the abstract features associated with causative or anticausative morphology were phonologically spelled out in the learners’ respective L1s, such that if features were expressed with overt morphophonology in the L1 but with zero-morphology in the L2, L2 learners would tend to map those features on morphophonological forms specific to the L2; if features were expressed with zero-­morphology in the L1 but with overt morphology in the L2, learners would tend to assume, at least initially, that those features received no phonological content in the L2, either. They would thus not map them onto phonological material in Turkish. The learners would use other spell-outs in the L2 to encode the morphosyntactic features of their representations. The results showed that in general Spanish- and English-speaking learners correctly accepted forms with overt causative morphology with change of state verbs and with psych verbs in Turkish, even when these verbs in their languages have zero-morphology in transitive forms. The English learners were more inaccurate than the Spanish and Japanese learners accepting change of state verbs with anticausative morphology on the inchoative form. However, despite showing accuracy with grammatical forms, the Spanish and English-speaking learners of Turkish were inaccurate at rejecting ungrammatical forms. Since they accepted grammatical forms together with ungrammatical forms consistent with their L1, these learners exhibit optionality in their grammars. The Japanese had some problems with change of state verbs as predicted, perhaps due to the fact that change of state verbs in Japanese come in a variety of morphological patterns. Yet, the Japanese speakers were overall more inaccurate with change of state verbs of the causative patterns than with those of the anticausative pattern. With psych verbs, the intermediate Spanish and English groups were inaccurate at rejecting ungrammatical forms without causative morphology in the transitive form (*Arslan avcıyı korkmuş ‘The lion frightened the hunter’) and with anticausative morphology on the inchoative form (*Avcı korkulmuş ‘The hunter got frightened’), following their L1 patterns. The high-intermediate Spanish group, who seemed to have overcome L1 influence with these verbs, and the intermediate Japanese group, whose language behaves morphologically like Turkish with these verbs, were very accurate and patterned with the Turkish native speakers. Thus, the predictions based on L1 influence are largely confirmed. In cases where the L1 and L2 express the abstract features of causative or anticausative morphology

128 Silvina Montrul

overtly, learners have little difficulty learning the correct L2-specific morphophonological spell-outs for those features. In cases where the L1 and L2 differ in terms of morphological spell-outs, learners tend to behave according to what their L1 dictates: Thus, although the English-speaking learners appear to have acquired the morphology of Turkish (they do not accept all zero-derived forms and reject derived forms), with the exception of verbs like bat-ır-mak (Table 4), their ratings are lower for grammatical forms and higher for ungrammatical forms than those of the other groups. The purpose of this study was to document and explain potential problems with the morphological realizations of causative and anticausative morphology with change of state verbs and psych verbs, and the findings largely demonstrated that the L1 indeed plays a role in this respect. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that difficulty with transitive psych verbs can also be due to the way in which arguments are mapped to syntactic positions, as many studies have already documented (Chen 1996; Juffs 1996; Montrul 1999a, b; White et al. 1998). Since the mapping of the thematic roles with agentive change of state verbs does not violate prominence relations among arguments, while the mapping of psych verbs does (Grimshaw 1990), one expects learners to be more inaccurate with transitive psych verbs than with transitive change of state verbs. If the problem were only morphological, then learners should behave alike with both verb classes. In this respect, the acceptability ratings of the intermediate English and Spanish learners were statistically different from each other (English; t(17) = 2.064, p O; *O>S

(2) Her kedi-yi biri okşu-yor  every cat-acc someone.nom pet-prog.3sg ‘Someone is petting every cat’

S>O; O>S

In (1) and (2), both structures contain an indefinite subject and a universal object, which are treated as quantifier phrases (QPs). However, both sentences behave differently with respect to quantifier scope interpretation. In canonical SOV sentences as in (1), the sentence has only one reading, where a single person is petting all the cats (S>O).2 But in scrambled OSV sentences, it is ambiguous between the reading in which a single person is petting all the cats (S>O) and the reading in which every cat was petted by a potentially different person (O>S). This shows that Turkish is a scope-rigid language meaning that only the surface scope reading is relevant for canonical SOV sentences and the inverse scope reading is available only in scrambled OSV sentences.3 Japanese and Turkish are similar in terms of scope relations. Similar to Turkish, the scope of quantificational elements in Japanese corresponds to the surface position of these elements in canonical SOV sentences, while the inverse scope readings are possible only for scrambled OSV sentences. Quantifier scope relations in English, however, differ from those in Japanese and Turkish. In English, the inverse scope reading is allowed in canonical structures. These cross-linguistic differences among English, Japanese, and Turkish provide a good opportunity to identify the source of cross-linguistic transfer. In recent years, various proposals for L3 transfer have been put forth (see Section 3 for a detailed discussion). In this study, we test four such proposals: (1) the 1. The abbreviations used are as follows: acc (accusative case), dat (dative case), gen (genitive case), nom (nominative case), prog (progressive), sg (singular). 2. The symbol “>”, is used to indicate that the element preceding > takes scope over the element following >. Thus ‘S>O’ means ‘the indefinite subject quantifier is understood to take scope over the universal object quantifier’. 3. In this study the term “scope-rigid language” refers to a language in which the scope of quantificational elements corresponds only to the surface position of these elements in SOV sentences where the indefinite subject precedes the universal object. On the other hand, in a sentence like (i) both surface and inverse scope readings are available. (i) Her çocuk bir kedi-yi okşu-yor every child a cat-acc pet-prog.3sg ‘Every child is petting a cat’



Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 137

Typological Primacy Model (Rothman 2011); (2) the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk 2007); (3) the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn, Foley & Vinnitskaya 2004); and (4) non-transfer positions (Clahsen & Muysken 1989; Epstein, Flynn & Martohardjono 1998). While the L2 Status Factor suggests that the L2 acts as a filter, blocking transfer from the L1 at the syntactic level, the Typological Primacy Model proposes that regardless of the order of acquisition, typology is the determining factor for cross-linguistic transfer. The Cumulative Enhancement Model, however, only assumes facilitative transfer, claiming that previous linguistic knowledge (either L1 or L2) can potentially enhance subsequent language development or remain neutral. The non-transfer positions do not necessarily predict cross-­linguistic transfer from previously acquired languages into the acquisition of a subsequent language. In reference to these positions, the present study examines whether or not cross-linguistic transfer occurs in L3 acquisition of Turkish and if so, whether it comes from L1 Japanese (a language which is typologically closer to Turkish) or from L2 English, which can potentially block transfer from the L1. The rest of the chapter is organized as follows. The next section (Section 2) details quantifier scope relations in all three languages under investigation. Section 3 provides a summary of models of language transfer in L3 acquisition. This is followed by a brief overview of studies on quantifier interpretation in native and non-native speakers. The subsequent sections outline the research questions and hypotheses of the present study and report on the experimental procedure and results. The final section presents a discussion of the results and conclusion. 2. A cross-linguistic analysis of quantifier scope relations in English, Japanese, and Turkish The languages involved in this study demonstrate some differences with respect to quantifier scope relations. In English, when a sentence includes two quantifiers, it often creates scope ambiguity (Aoun & Li 1989, 1993; May 1977 among others). For instance, the sentence in (3) is ambiguous between the interpretation in which a single person is reading all the books and the interpretation in which every book is being read by a potentially different person. (3) English (SVO) Someone is reading every book Interpretations: (i) There is a person x, such that x is reading every book y. (ii) For each book y, there is a person x such that x is reading y.

S>O; O>S

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The interpretation in (i) shows that the indefinite subject DP takes wide scope (i.e. S>O), while in (ii), the universal object DP takes wide scope (i.e. O>S). Unlike English, Japanese and Turkish are generally assumed to be scope-rigid languages. In other words, the scope is unambiguous when there is no syntactic movement (see, among others, Hoji 1985; Kuno 1973; Kuroda 1970 for Japanese and see, among others, Aygen-Tosun 1999; Göksel 1998; Kelepir 2001; Kural 1992; Zidani-Eroğlu 1997 for Turkish). As shown in (4) and (5), only the subject-wide interpretation (i.e. S>O) is available in canonical SOV word order. (4) Japanese (SOV) Dareka-ga dono hon-mo yonde-imasu S>O; *O>S someone-nom every book-acc read-prog ‘Someone is reading every book’ Interpretation: There is some person x, such that x is reading every book y. (5) Turkish (SOV) Biri her kitab-ı oku-yor  S>O; *O>S someone.nom every book-acc read-prog.3sg ‘Someone is reading every book’ Interpretation: There is some person x, such that x is reading every book y.

Turkish and Japanese are scrambling languages that allow morphologically casemarked elements to occur freely in pre-verbal positions (6)–(7). Sentence-initial scrambling of the object QP changes the scope relations between the object and the subject QP in Japanese and Turkish. That is, scrambled OSV sentences in Japanese and Turkish are ambiguous in the sense that they allow both subject-wide and object-wide interpretations (see Hoji 1985; Kuno 1973; Kuroda 1970 for Japanese; Aygen-Tosun 1999; Göksel 1998; Kural 1992; Zidani-Eroğlu 1997 for Turkish). (6) Japanese (OSV) Dono hon-mo dareka-ga yonde-imasu every book-acc someone-nom read-prog Interpretations: (i) There is some person x, such that x is reading every book y. (ii) For each book y, some person x is reading y. (7) Turkish (OSV) Her kitab-ı biri oku-yor  every book-acc someone.nom read-prog.3sg Interpretations: (i) There is some person x, such that x is reading every book y. (ii) For each book y, some person x is reading y.

S>O; O>S

S>O; O>S



Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 139

Two types of scrambling have been discussed in the literature (e.g. Mahajan 1990; Webelhuth 1989): A- and A′-scrambling. A-scrambling moves a phrase to an argument (A) position, while A′-scrambling moves a phrase to a non-argument (A′) position. Pre-verbal scrambling in Japanese and Turkish is assumed to be into either an A- or an A′-position (Miyagawa 2001, 2003; Öztürk 2005; Saito 1992; Tada 1992 among others). Depending on the interpretation, the scrambled object may occupy an A-position4 or an A′-position (i.e. SpecCP). Following Miyagawa (2001) and Öztürk (2005), we argue that the ambiguity in (7) follows from two distinct derivations: on one derivation, as seen in (8), the universal object takes wide scope due to A-movement into SpecTP to check off EPP, leaving the subject in situ below the universal object. As for the second interpretation, as seen in (9), first the subject A-moves to SpecTP and checks EPP, then the universal object her kitabı ‘every book’ is displaced into the CP domain via A′-movement. Since the movement of the universal object is an instance of A′-movement, it can reconstruct back into its base position.5 Hence the universal object takes narrow scope with respect to the subject biri ‘someone’. (8) [CP [SpecTP her kitab-ıj [vP biri tj [VP tj oku-yor]]]] A-movement every book-acc someone.nom read-prog.3sg

O>S

(9) [CP her kitab-ıj [SpecTP birii [vP ti tj [VP tj oku-yor]]]] A-movement A′-movement every book-acc someone.nom read-prog.3sg

S>O

The similarities and differences among the three languages in terms of quantifier scope relations are summarized in Table 1. 3. Transfer in L3 acquisition L3 acquisition can be identified as the acquisition of an additional language by learners who have previously acquired two other languages (Cenoz 2003). In a

4. A-position can be a SpecTP in a language, where Extended Projection Principle (EPP) is satisfied by any DP or by a DP with focus. 5. Here, a question arises as to whether the universal object can also be interpreted in the moved position, when it undergoes A′-movement. Following Tada (1992), who argues that A′-scrambling undergoes obligatory reconstruction, we assume that the universal object in (9) necessarily undergoes reconstruction so that it can only be interpreted in its original position.

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Table 1.  Aspects of quantifier scope in the languages Order

Structure

Canonical: S-O

∃-nom … ∀-acc …

Non-canonical: O-S

Scope

S>O O>S ∀-acci … ∃-nom … ti S>O O>S

Japanese

English

Turkish

Yes No Yes Yes

Yes Yes – –

Yes No Yes Yes

broader definition, L3 acquisition refers to the acquisition of all languages beyond the second (De Angelis 2007). There are numerous studies investigating the influence of previously learned language(s) on the acquisition of an L2 or an L3 (Dewaele 1998; Hammarberg & Williams 1993; Singleton 1987; Wang 2013 among many others). Nevertheless, it is difficult to identify one single variable determining the cross-linguistic influence in either L2 or L3 acquisition (see contributions in Leung 2009). On the basis of different studies using various methodologies and different languages, researchers (e.g. De Angelis & Selinker 2001; Grosjean 2001) have identified a number of factors determining cross-linguistic influence. Among these factors are language typology, the type and frequency of the linguistic form examined, the learner’s proficiency level, the amount of L2/L3 exposure/use, language mode, the degree of linguistic awareness, the learner’s age, the learner’s educational background and literacy as potential factors affecting language transfer (Murphy 2003). It is very likely that multiple factors play a role in cross-linguistic transfer in L2 and L3 acquisition. In the context of L3 acquisition, different models make different predictions as to the role of cross-linguistic transfer. In these models, factors such as language typology, the acquisition order, language proficiency are assumed to play a role in the extent of transfer (Williams & Hammarberg 1998). For example, the Typological Primacy Model (TPM) (Rothman 2011) argues that depending on the typological similarity, either the L1 or the L2 can potentially be the main source of transfer in L3 acquisition. Crucially, previously acquired languages may not only facilitate but also hinder L3 development. Positive or negative transfer may be determined by whether or not the learner perceives the L3 to be typologically related to the L1 or the L2. According to Rothman (2011), in addition to other factors, similarities in syntactic structure could be used by the learner to determine the relative typological proximity among languages. Rothman argues that, although much of the subtleties and nuances of the L3 syntactic system may not be available to L3 learners at the initial stages, properties such as the canonical word order, head directionality, and licensing of null subjects should be perceptible even at the earliest stages of L3 acquisition.



Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 141

In another model known as the ‘L2 Status Factor’, it is assumed that, in L3 acquisition, the L2 (the chronologically last acquired system) will be the source of transfer (Bardel & Falk 2007; Falk & Bardel 2011; Williams & Hammarberg 1998). In this view, the L2 acts as a filter, blocking the accessibility of L1 grammar. This is interpreted as the L2 (rather than the L1) being the strongest source of transfer. Overall the assumption is that it may be easier for an L3 learner to activate a non-native language (i.e. L2) as a source of transfer rather than the native language during L3 acquisition. In another model, referred to as the Cumulative Enhancement Model (CEM), Flynn et al. (2004) propose that features and functional categories can be transferred from both the L1 and the L2 as long as this is facilitative. In other words, the assumption is that any previously acquired language can enhance (or show neutral effects in) the acquisition of any subsequent language. Unlike the TPM, non-facilitative (i.e. negative) transfer is not predicted in this model. Alternatively, the non-transfer option is possible as suggested by Clahsen and Muysken (1989), and Epstein et al. (1998) for L2 acquisition. Although these two groups of researchers have different views as to the involvement of Universal Grammar in L2 acquisition, they both assume that the role of L1 transfer in L2 acquisition is only minimal. This position can also be said to hold for L3 acquisition when no transfer occurs from either the L1 or the L2. Before detailing the research questions and hypotheses in light of these L3 models, it will be useful to present previously reported cross-linguistic data as to native and non-native interpretations of quantifier scope in English and Japanese. 4. Quantifier scope interpretation 4.1

An overview of quantifier scope interpretation by native speakers

Several studies have investigated L1 English speakers’ interpretation of double-­ quantifier (QP-QP) sentences (Anderson 2004; Ionin 2010; Ionin, Luchkina & Stoops 2014; Ioup 1975; Kurtzman & MacDonald 1993; O’Grady 2007; Tunstall 1998 among others). The general conclusion of these studies is that L1 English speakers prefer surface scope readings over inverse scope readings, while both scope readings are available. Alongside offline studies (Anderson 2004; Ioup 1975; Kurtzman & MacDonald 1993), online measures showed a slowdown in reading times when the continuation disambiguates the sentence in favour of the inverse scope reading (Anderson 2004; Tunstall 1998), indicating a tendency for surface scope interpretations.

142 Sıla Ay and Özgür Aydın

In order to account for the preference of surface scope readings over inverse scope readings, Anderson (2004: 31) proposes the Processing Scope Economy Principle, as formulated in (10): (10) Processing Scope Economy The human sentence processing mechanism prefers to compute a scope configuration with the simplest syntactic representation (or derivation). Computing a more complex configuration is possible but incurs a processing cost.

Anderson (2004) argues that the derivation of sentences with surface scope readings is syntactically simpler and, therefore, less costly to process. On the other hand the derivation of sentences with inverse-scope reading involves an extra syntactic operation (namely movement of the object to a position higher than the subject), and is, therefore, taken to be more complex than the derivation of sentences with surface-scope reading. Another account that explains this phenomenon is O’Grady’s (2007) emergentist account, which relies on the language processor as the cognitive system that determines scope relations. For example, in a sentence such as someone is reading every book, the processor initially interprets the indefinite DP, someone as referring to a single entity. In order to derive the inverse scope interpretation (i.e. O>S) upon encountering the universally quantified DP, every book, the processor must abandon its normal linear course and reprocess the reference of the previously interpreted indefinite DP, someone as multiple persons. According to O’Grady (2007), this leads to significant computational cost. As for Japanese native speakers, the surface scope reading is generally preferred in SOV sentences, although some quantifiers (e.g. futa ‘two’, subete ‘all’) allow inverse scope (Han, Storoshenko & Sakurai 2009). Similarly, Marsden (2009) found that native Japanese speakers have significantly higher acceptance rates (87.5%) on subject-wide scope than object-wide scope (16.0%) in SOV sentence in L1 Japanese. According to her findings, with scrambled OSV word order, both subject-wide and object-wide scope become readily acceptable (81.5% for the O>S interpretation and 80.5% for the S>O interpretation). On the other hand, Sano’s (2004) data showed that Japanese monolingual children rejected the universal object-wide interpretation (O>S) in both canonical SOV and scrambled OSV sentences. This means that they did not change scope despite the scrambled OSV order. In other words, Japanese monolingual children prefer S>O readings over O>S readings in both sentence types.



4.2

Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 143

Quantifier scope interpretation of non-native speakers

The literature on L2 acquisition of quantifier scope contains a number of studies that have examined different scope relations, namely, wh-QP interactions (e.g. Dekydtspotter, Sprouse & Swanson 2001; Marsden 2008; Miyamoto & Takata 1998; Miyamoto & Yamane 1996), neg-QP interactions (e.g. Chung 2013; Lee 2009; Özçelik 2009), and QP-QP interactions (e.g. Chu, Gabriele & Minai 2014; Čulinović 2013; Ionin, Luchkina, & Stoops 2014; Lee, Yip & Wang 1999; Marsden 2004, 2009). Since the present study deals only with the structures that contain an indefinite subject and a universal object, we will, in this section, only discuss studies examining the QP-QP interpretation. L2 studies of quantifier scope have looked primarily at scope-rigid languages (e.g. Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Russian) versus languages exhibiting scope ambiguity (e.g. English), which are assumed to allow inverse scope readings. Lee et al. (1999), for instance, investigated Chinese learners’ knowledge of quantifier scope interpretation in L2 English. As discussed above, QP-QP sentences in English have two interpretations, whereas those in Chinese only have the subject-­ wide scope interpretation available. The aim of this particular study was to find out whether L2 learners demonstrated any evidence of L1 transfer by rejecting inverse scope in English and whether they showed native-like sensitivity to the effects of quantifier type and thematic role in assigning inverse scope. L2 learners’ interpretations of three sentence types (i.e. NumP-every N, NumP-all N, NumPNum) were examined. The results showed that there were no significant differences among the intermediate, advanced L2 learners, and native English speakers. The key finding was that L1 Chinese-speaking learners of English did not reject O>S in English, suggesting that there was no L1 transfer effect. Nevertheless, Lee et al. (1999) argued that these findings did not rule out L1 knowledge being transferred into the L2 at the initial L2 state, because they believed that the intermediate L2 group was already too advanced for any transfer effect to be detected. Although English and Chinese exhibit different quantifier scope relations in active sentences, in passive sentences both languages allow indefinite subject-wide scope and universal object-wide scope interpretations. From this point of view, Chu et al. (2014) investigated whether Chinese learners of English can interpret active and passive QP-QP sentences similarly to English native speakers or whether they are constrained by the properties of their L1. Their results showed that in active sentences, Chinese learners of English exclusively accepted the indefinite subject-wide scope reading and strongly rejected the universal object-wide scope reading, while native speakers preferred the indefinite subject-wide scope over the universal object-wide scope reading. Although in passive sentences where native speakers accepted both interpretations, the learners showed a preference for

144 Sıla Ay and Özgür Aydın

the indefinite subject-wide scope interpretation. According to Chu et al. (2014), these results suggest that there is transfer from L1 Chinese and that positive evidence available as in passive sentences might not be robust enough for learners to acquire the new property in the L2. In a similar vein, Čulinović (2013) focused on the acquisition of L2 English by children whose L1 is a scope-rigid language, namely Japanese. Japanese children’s interpretation of ambiguous QP-QP sentences in English was examined. The results showed that children reliably accepted surface scope in English (83%) as opposed to inverse scope (16%). These findings were interpreted as supporting evidence for Schwartz and Sprouse’s (1994) Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis. In addition to the studies that investigated the L2 acquisition of English, a language which exhibits scope ambiguity allowing inverse scope readings, there are also studies examining the acquisition of scope-rigid languages. For example, Marsden (2004, 2009) investigated L2 Japanese knowledge of the scope interaction of quantifiers in L1-English and L1-Korean learners. Marsden (2009:144) used an acceptability judgment task to investigate quantifier interpretation in QPQP sentences as in (11). (11) a. Dareka-ga dono neko-mo nadeta someone-nom every cat stroked ‘Someone stroked every cat.’ b. Dono neko-mo dareka-ga nadeta every cat someone-nom stroked ‘Someone stroked every cat.’

As mentioned earlier, English QP-QP sentences allow two interpretations (S>O & O>S). However, in Japanese and Korean, in a SOV sentence, the O>S interpretation is absent whereas a scrambled OSV sentence allows both interpretations. The results revealed that overall, advanced learners of L2 Japanese tended to reject O>S interpretations. Intermediate level learners with L1 English were found to be more indeterminate in their responses than L1 Korean speakers. These results are taken to indicate that at least some learners are able to show target-like rejections of the O>S reading, despite the poverty of the stimulus. However, in OSV sentences, L2 learners of Japanese, like the native Japanese group, had significantly higher rates of acceptance of object-wide scope. These findings are consistent with Schwartz and Sprouse’s (1994) Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis. Following Beghelli and Stowell (1997), Marsden suggests that the key difference between English and Japanese/Korean is that only English has true distributive quantifiers (every), while Japanese and Korean have group-denoting quantifiers (dono/enu). In the light of these lexical differences, she claimed that L1 transfer occurs at the lexical level at the initial state of L2 acquisition.



Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 145

In another study, Marsden (2004) tested Korean and Chinese learners’ sensitivity to inverse scope readings in L2 Japanese. In this particular study, even intermediate-level participants correctly rejected inverse scope readings in SOV sentences. Since Korean and Chinese are like Japanese in terms of disallowing inverse scope, these findings imply facilitative effects of L1 on L2 acquisition of quantifier scope. Ionin, Luchkina and Stoops (2014) also focused on the acquisition of a scope-rigid language, namely Russian. All studies mentioned above tested the QP-QP sentences in which the indefinite subject precedes the universal object. However, Ionin et al. (2014) investigated L1 English learners’ interpretation of Russian SVO sentences in which the universal subject precedes the indefinite object as well as OVS sentences in which the universal subject is preceded by the indefinite object (see examples (12) & (13) from Ionin et al. 2014: 170). (12) a. Každaja devočka gladit odnogo kotenka every.nom girl.nom strokes one.acc kitten.acc ‘Every girl is stroking one kitten’ b. Odna devočka gladit každogo kotenka one.nom girl.nom strokes every.acc kitten.acc ‘One girl is stroking every kitten’

SOV

(13) a. Odnogo kotenka gladit každaja devočka one.acc kitten.acc strokes every.nom girl.nom ‘Every girl is stroking one kitten’ b. Každogo kotenka gladit odna devočka  every.acc kitten.acc strokes one.nom girl.nom ‘One girl is stroking every kitten’

OSV

SOV

OSV

Their findings indicated that the L1-English learners of Russian showed target-­ like performance in Russian canonical SVO sentences, while they were not target-like on scrambled OVS sentences. The learners showed a tendency to allow the S>O interpretation in both types of sentences. Ionin et al. (2014) accounted for this puzzling finding by proposing that the learners were translating the Russian sentences into L1 English, and subsequently basing their judgements of Russian scope on their L1 English. The authors suggested that they were unaware of the contribution that scrambling makes to scope interpretations; they interpreted sentences based on the morphosyntactic information (case marking) without reference to the topic-focus structure. Taken together, a considerable number of studies (Chu et al. 2014; Čulinović 2013; Ionin et al. 2014; Marsden 2004, 2009) provide evidence for full transfer particularly in the initial stages of L2 acquisition, indicating that learners initially use L1 properties in the L2. Studies involving L2 learners at a certain proficiency

146 Sıla Ay and Özgür Aydın

level do not always show clear L1 effects in this domain of grammar. For example, the results of Lee et al. (1999) do not show evidence of transfer in the performance of L1 Chinese learners of English despite the differences between Chinese and English. Such result has been linked to L2 learners’ proficiency in English because the participants in that study might have already passed the stage at which transfer would have been evident. In light of this background, the present study examines the L3 acquisition of quantifier scope interpretation in a scope-rigid language (i.e. Turkish) to provide additional data to identify the extent to which the scope-rigid L1 (i.e. Japanese) and the L2 which exhibits scope ambiguity (i.e. English) play a role in L3 acquisition. Findings will be relevant for evaluating different language transfer models for L3 acquisition. 5. Research questions and hypotheses As stated above the aims of this study are: (i) to identify the knowledge of distributive readings of universal quantifiers in L3 Turkish learners, whose L1 is Japanese and L2 is English; (ii) to examine quantifier scope interpretations with native Turkish speakers. In line with this, we seek to answer the following research questions: Research Question 1: Do L1-Japanese L2-English learners of L3 Turkish accept distributive subject or object-wide scope in canonical SOV and scrambled OSV sentences? Research Question 2: Do Turkish native speakers accept distributive subject or object-wide scope in canonical SOV and scrambled OSV sentences?

The first question gives rise to three specific hypotheses, with respect to cross-­ linguistic transfer from L1 and L2, respectively: Hypothesis 1: If the L1 is the source for transfer, Japanese learners of L3 Turkish will allow both surface scope and inverse scope interpretations in OSV sentences, but they will reject the inverse scope interpretation in SOV sentences (as predicted by the TPM and CEM). Hypothesis 2: If L2 English is the source for transfer, Japanese learners of L3 Turkish will allow both surface scope and inverse scope interpretations in SOV and OSV sentences (as predicted by the L2 Status Factor).

Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 147



Hypothesis 3: If Japanese learners of L3 Turkish disallow surface scope but allow inverse scope in canonical S-O sentences, this cannot be explained via L1 Japanese transfer. Similarly, rejection of either surface scope or inverse scope in OSV sentences cannot be linked to L1 Japanese influence, either because these are legitimate options in L1 Japanese (as in L3 Turkish). In terms of L2 English influence, since English allows both surface and inverse scope in S-O constructions, rejection of either surface or inverse scope in these constructions would suggest the absence of L2 English influence. Alternatively, if L3 learners display a particular preference for surface scope not only in SOV sentences but also in OSV sentences, this cannot be accounted for on the basis of L1/L2 transfer, either.

As summarized in the hypotheses, depending on the extent of L1 or L2 transfer, L3 learners of Turkish may differ from native Turkish speakers in their quantifier scope interpretations in SOV and OSV sentences. Specially, under the TPM, it is predicted that learners of Turkish will rely on L1 Japanese as it is typologically closer to L3 Turkish. Thus they will behave like native Turkish speakers and will allow both surface scope and inverse scope interpretations in OSV sentences, but they will correctly reject inverse scope interpretations in SOV sentences. Similar results are also expected under the CEM as it assumes enhancing effects either from the L1 or the L2. If, on the other hand, the L2 Status Factor is stronger than the typology factor, L2 learners will transfer the options available in L2 English only. They will, unlike native speakers, allow both surface and inverse scope readings in SOV and OSV sentences. If, however, neither L1 nor L2 transfer occurs, learners will not show any preference consistent with either the L1 or the L2 and diverge from native speakers. In other words, L3 learners will disallow surface scope and inverse scope interpretations in SOV and OSV sentences, respectively. 6. The study 6.1

Participants

The L3 group consisted of 14 L1-Japanese-speaking learners of L3 Turkish (mean age: 21; age range 19–24). The participants were all students of the Turkish Language Department at a Japanese university and they were visiting Turkey at the time of testing. They all started to learn Turkish at an adult age (mean age of first exposure: 18) and have been learning Turkish in a classroom environment for an average of 34 months (range 7–72 months). The learners’ proficiency level was judged to be intermediate on the grounds that this is the level usually attained by

148 Sıla Ay and Özgür Aydın

learners in their third year at this particular university. However, no additional independent measure of proficiency was available. Although many participants had the experience of living in Turkey in the past for an average of 15 months (range: 1–18 months), they were not completely naturalistic learners. English, learned as a foreign language at school in Japan, was their L2. The native speaker group included 14 native Turkish speakers (mean age 26; age range: 22–33). They were all students at a state university in Ankara, Turkey and they had some knowledge of English as a foreign language. 6.2 Procedure The task design, including the drawings, was adapted from Marsden (2004) with her permission. The present task elicited participants’ judgments on doubly quantified SOV and OSV sentences in which the object QP and scope interpretations were varied. The scope variable was manipulated by means of 48 pictures, half of which provided the S>O scope contexts and the other half, the O>S contexts (see Figures 1–2). The task consisted of 24 test items, which were divided into two sets (i.e. SOV and OSV sentences) each including 12 tokens. SOV and OSV sentences included Type A (someone + every N) and Type B (Num N + every N) sentences (see Table 2). In addition to the 24 items, eleven distractors were added to each set. Each test sentence was presented in both S>O and O>S scope contexts, yielding a total of 48 test tokens (see Appendix for the complete list of test items).

S>O scope picture

O>S scope picture

Figure 1.  A pair of subject-wide and object-wide scope pictures6 for sentences Biri her kediyi okşuyor and Her kediyi biri okşuyor ‘Someone is petting every cat’ 6. In the actual experiment, the pictures appeared in colour in the test to avoid ambiguity.

Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 149



S>O scope picture

O>S scope picture

Figure 2.  A pair of subject-wide and object-wide scope pictures for sentences İki hemşire her hastaya bakıyor and Her hastaya iki hemşire bakıyor ‘Two nurses are looking after every patient’

First a training session was administered in order to familiarize the participants with the rating system. It included four examples to draw their attention to the complexity of pictures. The experimental task was conducted via SuperLab 4.0.4 (Cedrus Corporation, 2007). The procedure was as follows. At first the participants read the instructions of the task in their L1 (i.e. Japanese for the L3 group and Turkish for the native speaker group) then they saw a fixation point (+) on the screen for 1000 milliseconds. They viewed each picture on the screen for 1000 milliseconds without a corresponding sentence. Then the written sentence appeared on the Table 2.  Item types Sets

Type

Sample

SOV

A. someone+every N

Biri her kedi-yi okşu-yor 12 someone every cat-acc pet-prog.3sg ‘Someone is petting every cat’ İki hemşire her hasta-ya bak-ıyor 12 two nurses every patient-dat look.after-prog.3sg ‘Two nurses are looking after every patient’

B. Num N+every N

OSV

A. every N+someone

B. every N+Num N

n

Her kedi-yi biri okşu-yor. 12 every cat-acc someone pet-pres.3sg ‘Someone is petting every cat’ Her hasta-ya iki hemşire bak-ıyor 12 every patient-dat two nurses look.after-prog.3sg ‘Two nurses are looking after every patient’

150 Sıla Ay and Özgür Aydın

screen, and at the same time, an audio recording of the sentence was played. Audio recordings were made by a native speaker using neutral intonation (normally pre-verbal subjects in OSV or objects in SOV sentences are focused in Turkish). The picture and sentence remained on the screen together until the participants responded to the stimulus by judging whether the picture they saw matched the sentence they heard. They were asked to indicate their judgment on the keyboard, using a 4-point rating scheme: [–2]: no, definitely not; [–1]: not exactly; [+1]: yes, kind of, [+2]: yes, perfectly. A fifth option of [0] for ‘can’t decide’ was also available. All participants judged both item sets, with a short break between them. 7. Results Two ANOVAs were run separately for the native speaker group and the L3 group. To determine if there was a significant difference across the variables, a one-way repeated measures ANOVA was performed across observation of the different conditions (SOV[S>O], SOV[O>S], OSV[S>O], OSV[O>S]). Greenhouse-­ Geisser correction (Greenhouse-Geisser 1959) was applied to all repeated measures with more than one degree of freedom in the numerator. The results are presented in terms of acceptance ratings by the group. For the analysis, responses of [+1] or [+2] are considered to indicate acceptance of a particular scope interpretation, and [–1] or [–2] responses show rejection.7 In other words, this four-point scale was transformed to two-point scale for the analysis (see Marsden 2004). Selections of [0] accounted for only 0.24% (L3 group) and 0.85% (native speaker group) of responses to the test items. This mid-point category (i.e. [0]) was removed from the analysis in the study (see Sorace 1996 for a related discussion). 7.1

Results of native speakers

The mean acceptance rates of the native speakers are presented in Table 3. As it shows, in SOV sentences, the native speaker group accepted subject-wide interpretations but not object-wide interpretations. In OSV sentences, however, they had a higher tendency to accept object-wide scope readings in comparison to subject-­wide readings. The overall ANOVA revealed the main effect of conditions

7. The distribution of the responses are: 11.99% on [+1]; 48.55% on [+2]; 27.36% on [–2]; 11.86% on [–1]; 0.24% on [0] for the experiment group and 8.23% on [+1]; 54.84% on [+2]; 30.51% on [–2]; 5.57% on [–1]; 0.85% on [0] for the native speaker group.

Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 151



Table 3.  Mean acceptance rates of native speakers in SOV and OSV sentences Word order

SOV (n = 12)

OSV (n = 12)

Readings

Mean

SD

Mean

SD

S>O O>S

10.57  3.07

1.40 1.90

 8.21 10.57

2.26 1.65

Table 4.  Pairwise comparisons of native speakers’ judgements Mean difference

SD

Sig

7.50* 2.36* 2.36* 7.50*

.70 .82 .63 .82

.000 .013 .003 .000

SOV[S>O] – SOV[O>S] OSV[O>S] – OSV[S>O] SOV[S>O] – OSV[S>O] OSV[O>S] – SOV[O>S]

Based on estimated marginal means. * The mean difference is significant at the .05 level.

for the native speaker group: F(3,39) = 58.215, p < .001. Table 4 shows the pairwise comparisons of variables between conditions, which revealed significant effects of condition in the comparison of subject-wide and object-wide scope readings of SOV sentences [F(1,13) = 114.385, p < .001]. This is due to a significantly higher preference for the subject-wide scope reading in SOV sentences in the native speaker group. Similarly, the two scope readings were treated differently in OSV sentences by native speakers [F(1,13) = 8.342, p < .01]. They preferred the object-­ wide scope reading in OSV sentences. As for scope preferences, pairwise comparisons revealed that the acceptance of object-wide scope was significantly higher in scrambled OSV sentences than SOV sentences [F(1,13) = 178.043, p < .001]. The subject-wide scope was found to be significantly more acceptable in SOV sentences than OSV sentences in the native speaker group [F(1,13) = 13.812, p < .01]. 7.2

Results of the L3 group

Similar to the native speakers, the experimental group accepted subject-wide interpretations more than object-wide interpretations in SOV sentences (Table 5). In OSV sentences, however, the L3 group, unlike native speakers, had a tendency to accept subject-wide scope over object-wide scope. This suggests that the two groups have opposing scope preferences for OSV sentences. The overall ANOVA revealed a main effect of condition [F(3,39) = 55.342, p O O>S

11.00  2.57

1.41 2.68

10.78  6.50

1.42 2.77

Table 6.  Pairwise comparisons of the L3 group’s judgements SOV[S>O] – SOV[O>S] OSV[O>S] – OSV[S>O] SOV[S>O] – OSV[S>O] OSV[O>S] – SOV[O>S]

Mean difference

SD

Sig

 8.43* –4.29*   .21  3.93*

.80 .82 .35 .80

.000 .000 .551 .000

Based on estimated marginal means. * The mean difference is significant at the .05 level.

scope readings of SOV sentences, pairwise comparisons were conducted. The L3 group was able to differentiate between the two scope readings significantly clearly [F(1,13) = 114.385, p < .001]. Similarly, the two scope readings were treated differently in OSV sentences by the L3 group [F(1,13) = 27.209, p < .001]. Nevertheless, unlike the native speakers, who preferred the object-wide scope reading over the subject-wide scope reading in OSV sentences, the L3 group preferred the subject-wide scope reading in such sentences. As for the scope preferences, pairwise comparisons revealed that, as in the native speaker group, the L3 group’s acceptance of object-wide scope in scrambled OSV sentences was significantly higher than their SOV counterparts [F(1,13) = 24.023, p < .001]. However, the contrast between SOV and OSV sentences with respect to the preference of the subject-wide scope reading was not statistically significant in the L3 group [F(1,13) = 0.374, p = 0.551]. In Table 6, pairwise comparisons of variables between conditions were presented for the L3 group. 8. Discussion 8.1

General discussion

Overall, the findings revealed that native speakers and L3 participants correctly rejected object-wide scope interpretations in SOV sentences. This suggests that L3 learners are sensitive to the fact that the inverse scope reading is not available in Turkish. In scrambled OSV sentences, both groups correctly allowed both



Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 153

surface scope and inverse scope interpretations. Nevertheless, the L3 group’s preference for subject-wide readings was higher than object-wide readings in OSV sentences. This pattern was completely the opposite in the native speaker group, who preferred object-wide readings over subject-wide readings in such contexts. As mentioned above, three hypotheses emerged from the first research question. Our first hypothesis predicted that the L3 group would reject the inverse scope interpretation in SOV sentences but allow both surface scope and inverse scope interpretations in OSV sentences (in line with the TPM and CEM). The data showed that, in SOV sentences, the learners allowed only the surface scope interpretation. In OSV sentences, however, they rejected the surface scope interpretation (i.e. O>S); instead they had a preference for the inverse scope interpretation (i.e. S>O). This suggests that Japanese learners of Turkish do not transfer L1 syntactic properties despite the typological similarities between Japanese and Turkish, contra Rothman’s (2011) TPM and Flynn et al.’s (2004) CEM. Recall that Marsden’s (2004) findings indicated that native Japanese speakers showed no difference between the two scope interpretations, accepting both readings. Thus our results suggest that there is no transfer from L1 Japanese. If there had been transfer from the L1, Japanese learners of Turkish would have equally accepted surface scope and inverse scope interpretations in OSV sentences, as they do in their L1. As for the second hypothesis, our results suggest that, contrary to the prediction of the L2 Status Factor (Bardel & Falk 2007). English interlanguage does not appear to be the source for language transfer in Turkish acquisition because the results indicate that L3 learners do not allow surface scope and inverse scope interpretations equally, instead they find subject-wide interpretations more acceptable than object-wide in both SVO and OSV sentences. This suggests that they do not treat L3 Turkish like a language such as English, which exhibits scope ambiguity. Results of an L2 acquisition study reported by Ionin et al. (2014) also argued that English learners of Russian tended to allow the subject-wide interpretation in both types of sentences. This preference for subject-wide scope of OSV sentences was also found for Japanese monolingual children (Sano 2004). Thus the preference observed in our L3 study and in previous L1/L2 studies seems to be a general processing preference which is independent of the learners’ L1 or L2. In sum, the present findings cannot be accounted for on the basis of the TPM/CEM or the L2 Status Factor. The fact that L3 learners of Turkish prefer the subject-­wide scope interpretation in both SOV and OSV sentences cannot be indicative of particular L1 Japanese or L2 English influence, supporting non-­ transfer hypotheses (e.g. Clahsen & Muysken 1989; Epstein et al. 1998). As for the second research question, the data shows that the native speakers prefer surface scope readings over inverse scope readings in both SOV and OSV

154 Sıla Ay and Özgür Aydın

sentences. This result is consistent with the findings in the literature (Anderson 2004; Ioup 1975; Kurtzman & MacDonald 1993; O’Grady 2007; Tunstall 1998; among others). The reason of this preference is that the sentence with the subject-­ wide interpretation seems to be more difficult to parse than that of the object-­ wide interpretation from a point of complex movement patterns. Since movement is more costly than merge, native speakers have more difficulty with the parsing of a sentence like (15) than that of a sentence like (14). This is an expected result because of greater derivational complexity, and this explanation is also in line with the Processing Scope Economy of Anderson (2004: 31). (14) [CP [SpecTP her kitab-ıj [vP biri tj [VP tj oku-yor]]]] 2 1 every book-acc someone.nom read-prog.3sg

O>S

(15) [CP her kitab-ıj [SpecTP birii [vP ti tj [VP tj oku-yor]]]] 2 3 1 every book-acc someone.nom read-prog.3sg

S>O

8.2

Some remarks on processing issues in L3 speakers

A question that arises here is why L3 speakers allow mostly the subject-wide interpretation in both SOV and OSV sentences. This preference may possibly be due to the semantics of the subjects. In the sentences tested in this study, the subject is always indefinite.8 It is known that different quantifier types have different scope-­ taking abilities and indefinites can take scope out of scope islands even though other quantifiers cannot (Fodor & Sag 1982; Kratzer 1998; Reinhart 1997). Given this fact, it may be expected that regardless of their position in the structure, indefinites may be allowed to take wide scope. This claim, however, is not convincing, because, first, the narrow scope interpretation for indefinites has been reported in some psycholinguistic experiments carried out with native speakers (e.g. Anderson 2004; Kurtzman & MacDonald 1993) and second, it is not consistent with our L1 data demonstrating that the native speakers prefer surface scope readings over inverse scope readings in both SOV and OSV sentences, where S 8. One of our reviewers notes that the preference of L3 speakers’ subject-wide interpretation in both SOV and OSV sentences may be due to the fact that in all the test sentences the subject is indefinite and indefinite subjects tend to take, cross-linguistically, wide scope regardless of their position in the structure. However, as discussed earlier, our native speaker data revealed that the preference of the S>O reading in OSV sentences is not high even if subjects are indefinite.



Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 155

is indefinite. Thus, L3 speakers may be using a different strategy to process these sentences. Languages fall into several subtypes as agreement- or discourse-­prominent languages. Japanese, which lacks morphological agreement is a discourse-­prominent language; however English is an agreement-prominent language (e.g. Miyagawa 2005). On the other hand, Turkish is claimed to be in the middle position between the discourse-prominent and agreement prominent languages. Thus Turkish is a language, which is both agreement-based and discourse-configurational (e.g. Jiménez-Fernández 2010; Jiménez-Fernández & Miyagawa 2014). As mentioned above, we have adopted a mixed approach to explain the ambiguity of OSV sentences in Turkish. Depending on the interpretation, the scrambled object may occupy an A-position (i.e. SpecTP) in a language which is discourse-­configurational (see (8)) or an A′-position (i.e. SpecCP) in a language which is agreement-­based (see (9)). We assume that L3 speakers perceive Turkish  as an agreement-prominent language. Therefore they prefer the derivation in (9) over the derivation in (8). There are two possibilities that trigger L3 speakers’ perception of Turkish as an agreement-prominent language: The first one is L2-English transfer. As English is agreement-prominent, in ‘narrow’ syntax’ the agreement-prominent feature may have been transferred from English. But this is a weak possibility because, if this had been the case, there would have been transfer from English in scope relations (i.e. at the syntax-semantic interface). However, this was not observed. Also, this may mean that transfer does not occur at the syntax-semantic interface but in ‘narrow syntax’ only. In the literature, however, it has been claimed that the interface domains (such as the syntax-semantics interface) are in some sense harder to acquire or subject to more persistent difficulties than properties relating to ‘pure’ (non-interface) domains, such as ‘narrow’ syntax (see Sorace 2011; White 2011). Within this perspective, transfer should be in the syntax-semantic interface domain (i.e. in scope ralations, which is more complex). However, this does not seem to account for what we observe in the data. Another possibility of why L3 speakers perceive Turkish as an agreement-­ prominent language may be related with the issue of markedness. Since verbal person marking is very common across languages (only about one fifth of the world’s languages lack some form of verbal person marking) (see Siewierska 2013), being an agreement-prominent language may be considered typologically unmarked. This may be the reason why L3 speakers prefer the derivation in (9) over the derivation in (8). In other words, L3 speakers assume that Turkish is an agreement-­ prominent language because it exhibits morphological agreement overtly. We assume that, in L3 speakers’ syntactic processing, the agreement features attract the category agreed with, to SpecTP, which means that the universal object

156 Sıla Ay and Özgür Aydın

necessarily raises to SpecCP (16a).9 When the subject biri ‘someone’ is encountered, as in (16b), the parser merges it into SpecTP. Such processing is the same with the derivation of native speakers in (9) and L3 speakers prefer this derivation, because it is considered typologically unmarked. As a result, the universal object reconstructs back into its base position, thereby it takes narrow scope with respect to the subject biri ‘someone’ (16c). (16) a. [SpecCP her kitab-ıj … b. [SpecCP her kitab-ıj [SpecTP birii … c. [SpecCP her kitab-ıj [SpecTP birii [vP ti [VP tj oku-yor]]]] every book-acc someone.nom read-prog.3sg reconstruction

In sum, although Turkish is claimed to be both agreement-based and discourse-­ configurational language, L3 speakers employ a strategy that uses an unmarked configuration (i.e. agreement-based configuration). Although this agreement-­ based strategy seems to be in concordance with their L2 English, we argue that this strategy cannot indicate English influence. If there had been transfer from L2 English, L3 learners would have allowed both surface and inverse scope interpretations. However, as discussed earlier, this is not what we observe in the data. 9. Conclusion This chapter has reported on a study examining L3 knowledge of distributive readings of universal quantifiers in Turkish. Our findings indicate that Japanese learners of L3 Turkish allow mostly the subject-wide interpretation in both SOV and OSV sentences. This finding is consistent with our third hypothesis (i.e. no transfer) while contradicting the other three views (i.e. the TPM, CEM and L2 Status Factor). Given the limited number of studies on acquisition of quantifiers, we believe that this particular study can contribute to the literature by providing a new set of data from adult learners of Turkish. The findings are also revealing from the perspective of testing transfer models in L3 acquisition. Data from native Turkish speaker is also significant because, to our knowledge, this is the first study revealing quantifier scope interpretations of L1 Turkish speakers. The native speaker data shows a preference for surface scope readings over inverse scope readings in both SOV and OSV sentences, which is consistent with the findings 9. Also, the learners are aware of the scrambling phenomenon and they interpret scrambled OSV sentences based on the morphosyntactic information (i.e. accusative marker: her kitab-ı every book-acc).



Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 157

of previous studies with native speakers of English (Anderson 2004; Ioup 1975; Kurtzman & MacDonald 1993; O’Grady 2007; Tunstall 1998; among others). The overall results indicate that during sentence processing, while native speakers of Turkish prefer to compute a scope configuration with the simplest syntactic representation, L3 speakers of Turkish prefer an unmarked configuration, even though it is in some ways a more complex option.

Acknowledgments Our special thanks are due to Kleanthes K. Grohmann for his valuable comments on the earliest version of this chapter, S. Selçuk İşsever for his feedback throughout the study and, Dennis O’Keefe for proofreading our manuscript. We are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments and suggestions. We also wish to extend special thanks to our editor, Ayşe Gürel for her excellent editing skills and enthusiasm; all remaining errors are our own.

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Miyamoto, Y. & Takata, Y. 1998. Rigidity effects and the strong weak wh features in SLA. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 2, A. Greenhill, M. Hughes, H. Littlefield & H. Walsh (eds), 511–522. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. Miyamoto, Y. & Yamane, M. 1996. L2 rigidity: The scope principle in adult L2 grammar. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Vol. 2, A. Stringfellow, D. Cahana-Amitay, E. Hughes & A. Zukowski (eds), 494–505. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. Murphy, S. 2003 Second language transfer during third language acquisition. Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics 3(2): 1–21. O’Grady, W. 2007. The syntax of quantification in SLA: An emergentist approach. In Proceedings of the 8th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2006): The Banff Conference, M. G. O’Brien, C. Shea, & J. Archibald (eds), 98–113. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Özçelik, Ö. 2009. L2 acquisition of scope: Testing the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis. In Proceedings of the 10 the Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference (GASLA 2009), M. Bowles, T. Ionin, S. Montrul, & A. Tremblay (eds), 168–179. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. Öztürk, B. 2005. Case, Referentiality and Phrase Structure [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today 77]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. doi: 10.1075/la.77 Reinhart, T. 1997 Quantifier scope: How labor is divided between QR and choice functions. Linguistics and Philosophy 20: 335–397. doi: 10.1023/A:1005349801431 Rothman, J. 2011. L3 syntactic transfer selectivity and typological determinacy: The Typological Primacy Model. Second Language Research 27(1): 107–127. doi: 10.1177/0267658310386439 Saito, M. 1992. Long distance scrambling in Japanese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 1: 69–118. doi: 10.1007/BF00129574 Sano, T. 2004. Scope relations of QP’s and scrambling in the acquisition of Japanese. In Proceedings of the GALA 2003 Conference on Language Acquisition, J. van Kampen & S. Baauw (eds), 421– 431. Utrecht: LOT. Schwartz, B. D. & Sprouse, R. 1994. Word order and nominative case in nonnative language acquisition: a longitudinal study of (L1 Turkish) German interlanguage. In Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar [Language Acquisition and Language Disorderes 8], T. Hoekstra & B. D. Schwartz (eds), 317–368. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.  doi:  10.1075/lald.8.14sch

Siewierska, A. 2013. Verbal person marking. In The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, S. M. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (eds). Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. (15 January 2015). Singleton, D. 1987. Mother and other tongue influence on learner French: A case study. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 9: 327–346. doi: 10.1017/S0272263100006719 Sorace, A. 1996. The use of acceptability judgments in second language acquisition research. In Handbook of second language acquisition, W. C. Ritchie & T. K. Bhatia (eds), 375–409. San Diego CA: Academic Press. Sorace, A. 2011. Pinning down the concept of “interface” in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1: 1–33. doi: 10.1075/lab.1.1.01sor Tada, H. 1992. Nominative objects in Japanese. Journal of Japanese Linguistics 14: 91–108.

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Tunstall, S. 1998. The Interpretation of Quantifiers: Semantics and Processing. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusets. Wang, T. 2013. Cross-linguistic influence in third language acquisition: Factors influencing interlanguage transfer. Teachers College, Columbia University Working Papers in TESOL & Applied Linguistics 13(2): 99–114. Webelhuth, G. 1989. Syntactic Saturation Phenomena and the Germanic Languages. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. White, L. 2011. Second language acquisition at the interfaces. Lingua 121(4): 577–590.  doi:  10.1016/j.lingua.2010.05.005

Williams, S. & Hammarberg, B. 1998. Language switches in L3 production: Implications for a polyglot speaking model. Applied Linguistics 19: 295–333. doi: 10.1093/applin/19.3.295 Zidani-Eroğlu, L. 1997. Indefinite Noun Phrases in Turkish. PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Appendix: Test types Set 1, Type A (1) Biri her çocuğ-u azarlı-yor. someone every child-acc scold-prog.3sg ‘Someone is scolding every child’ (2) Biri her yemeğ-i deni-yor. someone every meal-acc try-prog.3sg ‘Someone is trying every meal’ (3) Biri her kedi-yi okşu-yor. someone every cat-acc pet-prog.3sg ‘Someone is petting every cat’ (4) Biri her kitab-ı oku-yor. someone every book-acc read-prog.3sg ‘Someone is reading every book’ (5) Biri her tabağ-ı düşür-üyor. someone every plate-acc drop-prog.3sg ‘Someone is dropping every plate’ (6) Biri her köprü-yü geç-iyor. someone every bridge-acc pass-prog.3sg ‘Someone is crossing every bridge’ Set 1, Type B (7) Üç kız her uçurtma-yı uçur-uyor. three girl every kite-acc fly-prog.3sg ‘Three girls are flying every kite’ (8) İki adam her kapı-yı boyu-yor. two men every door-acc paint-prog.3sg ‘Two men are painting every door’

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(9) İki turist her şehr-i gez-iyor. two tourists every city-acc wander-prog.3sg ‘Two tourists are wandering every city’ (10) İki hemşire her hasta-ya bak-ıyor. two nurses every patient-dat look.after-prog.3sg ‘Two nurses are looking after every patient’ (11) Üç çocuk her davul-u çal-ıyor. three children every drum-acc play-prog.3sg ‘Three children are playing every drum’ (12) İki çocuk her masa-yı temizli-yor. two children every table-acc clean-prog.3sg ‘Two children are cleaning every table’ Set 2, Type A (13) Her çocuğ-u biri azarlı-yor. every child-acc someone scold-prog.3sg ‘Someone is scolding every child’ (14) Her yemeğ-i biri deni-yor every meal-acc someone try-prog.3sg ‘Someone is trying every meal’ (15) Her kedi-yi biri okşu-yor. every cat-acc someone pet-prog.3sg ‘Someone is petting every cat’ (16) Her kitab-ı biri oku-yor. every book-acc someone read-prog.3sg ‘Someone is reading every book’ (17) Her tabağ-ı biri düşür-üyor. every plate-acc someone drop-prog.3sg ‘Someone is dropping every plate’ (18) Her köprü-yü biri geç-iyor. every bridge-acc someone pass-prog.3sg ‘Someone is passing every bridge’ Set 2, Type B (19) Her uçurtma-yı üç kız uçur-uyor. every kite-acc three girl fly-prog.3sg ‘Three girls are flying every kite’ (20) Her kapı-yı iki adam boyu-yor. every door-acc two man paint-prog.3sg ‘Two men are painting every door’ (21) Her şehr-i iki turist gez-iyor. every city-acc two tourist wander-prog.3sg ‘Two tourists are wandering every city’



Chapter 5.  Third language acquisition of quantifier scope 163

(22) Her hasta-ya iki hemşire bak-ıyor. every patient-dat to two nurse look.after-prog.3sg ‘Two nurses are looking after every patient’ (23) Her davul-u üç çocuk çal-ıyor every suitcase-acc three child steal-prog.3sg ‘Three children are playing every drum’ (24) Her masa-yı iki çocuk temizli-yor. every table-acc two child clean-prog.3sg ‘Two children are cleaning every table’

Chapter 6

Syntax/semantics/pragmatics of yes/no questions in second language Turkish Martina Gračanin-Yuksek and Bilal Kırkıcı Middle East Technical University

This paper examines the second language (L2) acquisition of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of Turkish yes/no (yn) questions across learners of different proficiency. Employing three tasks, we tested the participants’ knowledge of the syntax of yn questions, the semantic interpretations they assign to the construction, and their mastery of the pragmatic constraints that govern the use of various points of yn questions. Although the results show that the participants’ performance in all three areas we tested is commensurate with their overall proficiency in Turkish, the pragmatic competence of L2 learners seems to lag behind their competence in both syntax and semantics. This points to difficulties that interface phenomena pose to L2 learners, relative to narrow syntax. Keywords: L2 Turkish, yes/no questions, syntax-semantics interface, syntaxpragmatics interface, Turkish question particle­

1. Introduction In this paper we investigate the second language (L2) acquisition of the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties of yes/no (yn) questions in Turkish. The literature on second language acquisition (SLA) has shown that at any given stage of acquisition, the competence of a learner in one linguistic subsystem (e.g. syntax) may surpass the learner’s competence in another subsystem (e.g. phonology or morphology). For example, Ionin and Wexler (2002), who investigated the realization of verbal inflection by Russian children acquiring L2 English, observed that the learners produced low rates of misused inflection markers but often failed to provide the relevant morphology in their production. The authors hence argued that the learners’ interlanguage grammar did contain an accurate representation of Tense but that the learners had problems with the realization of surface morphology. doi 10.1075/lald.59.07gra © 2016 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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In an early study, Ioup (1984) tested whether native English speakers can differentiate between native and nonnative English participants based on (i) participants’ written texts, which gave them an estimate of participants’ syntactic proficiency; (ii) their spoken data, which provided them with phonological cues. She found that only access to spoken data allowed for correct native-­nonnative classification, which indicates that native-like syntax often does not go hand-­inhand with native-like phonology. It is thus possible, and indeed likely, for L2 learners to demonstrate different performance when it comes to syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of a single construction.1 Turkish yn questions provide a fertile ground for investigating L2 development in these different linguistic subsystems because they display syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties which are distinct from one another and also (to an extent) independent of one another. First, a syntactically well-formed yn question in Turkish may take a number of different forms, depending on the placement of the question particle mI. Nevertheless, there are variants that are not legitimate, i.e. there are positions in which mI cannot appear. If L2 learners of Turkish have acquired the syntactic constraints on the formation of yn questions, they are expected to judge as grammatical yn questions with acceptable placements of mI, but reject yn questions in which mI occupies an illicit position. Second, different placements of mI result in different semantic interpretations of the question: while some allow for a neutral, wide scope interpretation, others only yield a reading, which we call the narrow scope reading, on which the constituent immediately followed by mI is narrowly focused. The fact that both wide and narrow scope readings are generated using the same particle (mI) is the reason why this particle is referred to as a question focus particle (Kornfilt 1997). It, in effect, serves a dual function: it turns a statement into a question and it may place focus on a particular constituent within the question. Thus, an L2 learner of Turkish can be said to have acquired the semantics of yn questions if he/she can correctly pair the syntactic representation of a particular yn question with a correct interpretation or interpretations. Finally, appropriate usage of yn questions is governed by pragmatic principles and it does not necessarily follow from the semantics of the question (wide versus narrow scope interpretation). In other words, a speaker may know which syntactic representations of a yn question yield a wide scope reading and which do not, but he/she may still fail to use the appropriate form given the context of a situation. Thus, yn interrogatives in Turkish can be used to

1. Throughout the paper, we will refer to notions such as participants’ syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge/competence. The latter two expressions are meant to stand for knowledge pertaining to syntax-semantics and syntax-pragmatics interfaces.



Chapter 6.  Yes/no questions in second language Turkish 167

test whether the learner has acquired the pragmatic competence needed to use the structure in a felicitous discourse. Recent SLA research has shown a particular interest in explaining differential attainment of L2 learners across different sub-modules of grammar.2 One of the most obvious examples of such differential attainment comes from studies which show that L2 learners’ knowledge of L2 syntax is often more sophisticated than their usage of overt inflectional morphology might lead us to believe (Haznedar & Schwartz 1997; Lardiere 1998, 2007; Prévost & White 2000). L2 learners who show deficiencies in supplying inflectional morphemes (e.g. tense) may still demonstrate evidence of highly accurate syntactic representations of functional categories associated with such morphemes (e.g. nominative case assignment) (Lardiere 1998, 2007). This makes it difficult to reduce the nonnative performance of L2 learners to deficient knowledge of syntax (Franceschina 2001; Hawkins & Chan 1997). As an alternative, many SLA researchers have recently proposed that difficulties in L2 performance stem not from having deviant syntactic representations, but rather from having to integrate the knowledge of narrow syntax with the knowledge pertaining to other linguistic subsystems, as well as with non-linguistic cognitive systems. This integration of knowledge across different cognitive systems is referred to as interfaces (White 2011) and the proposal that interfaces are particularly vulnerable in the process of SLA came to be known as the Interface Hypothesis (IH) (Sorace 2005, 2006). A more recent version of the IH (Sorace 2011; Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Sorace & Serratrice 2009; Tsimpli & Sorace 2006) claims that among all the interfaces, the external interfaces are particularly problematic for L2 learners and may even pose difficulties that are never fully overcome, as suggested by the strong version of the hypothesis.3 In light of the existing L2 research that focuses on differential attainment across different sub-modules of grammar with reference to interfaces in SLA, our main goal in this paper is to find out whether the three areas in grammar (syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) pose equal difficulties for the L2 acquisition of Turkish YN questions. In order to test this, we have devised three different tasks, each testing learners’ competence in a different linguistic subsystem. The performance of L2 learners on each task was compared to the performance of a native Turkish control group. In line with existing research, we expected that our L2 participants would show different levels of competence in the three areas tested and that they 2. We use ‘grammar’ in a broad sense, taking it to indicate not only the knowledge of a strictly computational linguistic system, but also the knowledge pertaining to its interfaces with other systems, including pragmatics. 3. See White (2011) for the discussion of relative difficulties posed by external and internal interfaces.

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would have most problems in the area of pragmatics. Before we turn to each of the tasks, we first present the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of yn questions in Turkish. 2. Turkish YN questions 2.1

The syntax of yn questions

As stated above, a yn question in Turkish is formed by the insertion of the question particle mI into a declarative sentence. Particle mI is commonly analyzed as an enclitic (Kornfilt 1997: 438; Lewis 1967: 22). This enclitic can follow almost any constituent in an interrogative sentence: the verb, object, adjunct, subject or a pre-nominal possessor (marked with the genitive case). This is shown in (1).4 (1) a. Ali Ayşe için Ahmet’in mavi arabasını yıkadı mı? Ali Ayşe for Ahmet.gen blue car.acc washed Q ‘Did Ali wash Ahmet’s blue car for Ayşe?’ b. Ali Ayşe için Ahmet’in mavi arabasını mı yıkadı? Ali Ayşe for Ahmet.gen blue car.acc Q washed ‘Did Ali wash AHMET’S BLUE CAR for Ayşe?’ c. Ali Ayşe için mi Ahmet’in mavi arabasını yıkadı? Ali Ayşe for Q Ahmet.gen blue car.acc washed ‘Did Ali wash Ahmet’s blue car FOR AYŞE?’ d. Ali mi Ayşe için Ahmet’in mavi arabasını yıkadı? Ali Q Ayşe for Ahmet.gen blue car.acc washed ‘Did ALI wash Ahmet’s blue car for Ayşe?’ e. Ali Ayşe için Ahmet’in mi mavi arabasını yıkadı? Ali Ayşe for Ahmet.gen Q blue car.acc washed ‘Did Ali wash AHMET’S blue car for Ayşe?’

There are, however, certain positions from which mI is banned. The particle cannot be placed on a pre-nominal DP-internal constituent (with the exception of possessors, as we saw in (1e)) and it cannot appear on the complement of a post-­ position. These two illegitimate placements of mI are illustrated in (2).5 4. In these examples and in the remainder of the paper, capitalization in the translations indicates narrow focus. If no capitals are present, then the entire proposition is focused. 5. The particle also cannot appear on post-verbal constituents, except in alternative questions. Since this illegitimate placement of mI is not the focus of our study, we refer the interested reader to, for example, Göksel and Kerslake (2005).

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(2) a. *Ali Ayşe için Ahmet’in mavi mi arabasını yıkadı? Ali Ayşe for Ahmet.gen blue Q car.acc washed Lit. ‘Did Ali wash Ahmet’s BLUE car for Ayşe?’ b.  *Ali Ayşe mi için Ahmet’in mavi arabasını yıkadı? Ali Ayşe Q for Ahmet.gen blue car.acc washed Lit. ‘Did Ali wash Ahmet’s blue car for AYŞE?’

The reasons for the ungrammaticality of (2a–b) are presumably related to the fact that “mI [should attach] to the head of a phrase even when what is being questioned is one of the […] constituents [that modify the head]” (Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 255).6 Thus, the constraints on the placement of mI in Turkish yn questions are part of the syntactic knowledge of Turkish; speakers who possess the grammar which generates questions like the ones in (1a–e), but not the ones in (2a–b) can be said to have mastered the syntax of Turkish yn interrogative constructions. 2.2

The semantics of yn questions

In Turkish, the interpretation of a yn question depends on the position occupied by mI (different placements of mI are also accompanied by different intonation patterns). A yn question can have the following two kinds of readings: a narrow scope reading, on which the focus of the question is the constituent to which mI is

6. The question particle can, however, be placed on non-heads in the case of possessors (as we saw in (1e)), compound verbs with free auxiliaries, as in (i), and nominal-verb compounds, as in (ii). (i) Sen şimdi o filmi görmüş mü oldun? you now that movie.ACC see-PERF Q became.2SG (also ‘görmüş oldun mu’) ( see-PERF became.2SG Q) ‘Have you now seen that movie?’  (Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 255) (ii) Sana yardım mı etti o adam? you.DAT help Q did.3SG that man (also ‘yardım etti mi’) ( help did.3SG Q) ‘Did that man help you?’ 

(Göksel & Kerslake 2005: 255)

No items in our grammaticality rating task included these configurations. In other words, the participants were asked to demonstrate whether they can correctly place mI on the head of the questioned phrase.

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cliticized, and a wide scope reading, on which the focus of the question is the entire proposition, and not any of its subparts.7 Any grammatical placement of mI may result in a narrow scope reading.8 The narrow scope reading is the only reading that arises if mI is placed on any constituent other than the verb or on the immediately preverbal constituent, as shown in (1c–e). However, if mI attaches to the verb (Aygen 2007; Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kornfilt 1997) or to an immediately preverbal constituent (Göksel & Kerslake 2005; Kamalı 2011), the question is ambiguous between a narrow scope and a wide scope reading. Thus, (3) and (4) are both ambiguous, as the translations suggest. (3)

Ahmet araba aldı mı? Ahmet car bought Q Wide scope reading: ‘Did Ahmet buy a car?’ Narrow scope reading: ‘Did Ahmet BUY a car?’

(4)

Ahmet araba mı aldı? Ahmet car Q bought Wide scope reading: ‘Did Ahmet buy a car?’ Narrow scope reading: ‘Did Ahmet buy a CAR?’

Aygen (2007) and Kornfilt (1997) argue that a wide scope reading of a yn question obtains if, at LF, mI has the entire proposition in its scope (i.e. in its c-­command domain). Thus, when a Turkish yn question displays a wide scope reading, it is plausible to assume that at LF, mI occupies a position in the C-system of the structure, which is associated with the interrogative force of the utterance. For concreteness, we take mI to be taking wide scope from the complementizer (C0) position, which hosts the interrogative feature (Chomsky 1995: 240). When mI is in a sentence-­ final position (cliticized onto the verb), as in (3), it most probably occupies the C0 position in narrow syntax. On the other hand, when mI occupies an immediately preverbal position, as in (4), we assume that it undergoes a covert movement to C0 (along the lines of Hagstrom 1998, 2000), where again it takes scope over the entire proposition. An alternative view for Turkish wide scope yn questions with mI on the immediately preverbal constituent is proposed by Kamalı (2011). Her analysis is that mI is a head that takes the VP as its complement and attracts the closest 7. As pointed out by a reviewer, the wide scope reading also characterizes questions in which mI takes scope over the VP. 8. A narrow scope reading of a Turkish YN question roughly corresponds to English cleft sentences, with the constituent that mI attaches to as the clefted element. Thus, the meaning of the Turkish question in (1d) could be paraphrased as (i). (i) Was it Ali who washed Ahmet’s blue car for Ayşe?

Chapter 6.  Yes/no questions in second language Turkish 171



VP-internal constituent to its specifier. This explains the wide scope reading that obtains when mI scopes over the VP, as noted in Note 6. The L2 acquisition of the semantics of Turkish yn questions thus involves establishing the correct mapping between a syntactic structure (the locus of mI) and the meaning that it yields (wide versus narrow scope). In addition, learners who have acquired the semantic properties of yn questions should be able to recognize the subtle semantic similarity between examples like (3) and (4), and the semantic distinctness of these two examples compared to those which feature a different placement of mI. 2.3

The pragmatics of yn questions

We saw in the previous subsection that a wide scope interpretation of a yn question may arise from two different structures: one in which mI is attached to the verb (the sentence final placement of mI, as in example (3)) and one in which mI appears on the immediately preverbal constituent, as in (4). Regardless of the semantic similarity between the meaning of (3) and the wide-scope reading of (4), their usage is tightly related to the situational context. Göksel and Kerslake (2005: 257) formulate the constraints on the distribution of questions in (3) and (4) as follows: “questions that have the structure of [(4)] are used when the speaker has an assumption about the situation s/he is asking about, usually because there are non-linguistic clues […] available to him/her.” On the other hand, questions in which mI follows the predicate, as in (3), are “out-of-the-blue questions, where the speaker has no assumptions about the situation.” As Göksel and Kerslake (2005) note, the evidence that the speaker has access to, which underlies the choice between the two wide-scope placements of mI ((3) vs. (4)), is usually non-linguistic in nature. In other words, it is the situation in which the speaker finds him/herself that provides him/her with relevant evidence. It follows then that yn questions with mI placed on the immediately preverbal constituent are felicitous when making inquiries about the immediate situation in which at least one of the interlocutors is involved, and infelicitous otherwise. Examples in (5) and (6) illustrate this. (5) Ali and Ayşe are at a party. All of a sudden, Ali realizes that Ayşe is not around. Thinking that she might be on the balcony having a cigarette, he asks the host: a. Ayşe sigara mı içiyor? Ayşe cigarette Q smoke.pres.prog ‘Is Ayşe smoking?’ b. #Ayşe sigara içiyor mu? Ayşe cigarette smoke.pres.prog Q

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(6) At a party, the host, Ali’s friend, introduces Ayşe to Ali. The next day, Ali calls his friend to find out more about Ayşe. Wanting to know whether she smokes, he asks: a. Ayşe sigara içiyor mu? Ayşe cigarette smoke.pres.prog Q ‘Does Ayşe smoke?’ b. #Ayşe sigara mı içiyor? Ayşe cigarette Q smoke.pres.prog

The discussion of the pragmatic conditions which govern the usage of yn questions indicates that knowing the (syntax and) semantics of yn interrogatives is not sufficient for speakers to verbally behave in a pragmatically appropriate fashion. In particular, the knowledge of the fact that both (3) and (4) may receive a wide scope reading, in contrast to yn questions with a different locus of mI, does not guarantee pragmatically appropriate behavior of L2 learners. Instead, the correct usage of yn questions in any particular situation requires knowing which form of a question with a wide scope interpretation may express an inquiry about the immediate situation and which form may express an inquiry about general circumstances. In order to use yn interrogatives felicitously, L2 learners thus have to become sensitive not only to subtle semantic differences among yn questions with various forms, but also to the pragmatic conditions that require one of the two wide scope possibilities. 3. The present study 3.1

Participants

A total of 89 participants took part in the study. The control group consisted of 34 native speakers of Turkish (6 males, mean age: 22.0) who were undergraduate students at a state university in Ankara. The L2 group consisted of 55 L2 learners of Turkish (30 males, mean age: 22.4) with various L1 backgrounds. Twenty-three L2 participants reported an Altaic language as their L1: Azeri (4), Kazakh (1), Meskhetian Turkish (5), Mongolian (2), Turkmen (7), Uyghur (2), and Uzbek (2). The remaining 32 participants reported a non-Altaic language as their L1: Albanian (3), Arabic (8), Berber (2), Bosnian (1), Chinese (3), Hausa (1), Hindi (1), Luganda (1), Pashto (2), Persian (6), Portuguese (1), Russian (1), Swahili (1), and Tajik (1).9 The inclusion of L2 participants from typologically different L1s was 9. Among the L1s of the L2 participants, there are those that form YN questions in a way similar to Turkish, i.e. by adding a sentence-final particle to a declarative sentence. Such languages

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inevitable because Turkish is still a less commonly taught foreign language and it is rather difficult to find a homogenous group of L2 learners sharing the L1, the L2 proficiency level, and the length of L2 exposure. As a reviewer correctly points out, this diversity in L1 backgrounds is a potential confounding factor that may create difficulty in ruling out possible transfer effects. We return to this problem in Note 13. All L2 participants were students at the Turkish Learning and Research Centre (TÖMER) of a Turkish university in Ankara, where they were attending intensive Turkish language classes. At the time of the study, the L2 participants had been living in Turkey for an average of 7.3 months (SD: 3.4) and had been learning Turkish for an average of 11.1 months (SD: 14.8). Based on continuous inhouse testing conducted at the language school, the L2 participants were divided by the institution into three proficiency groups: 15 participants with elementary level proficiency (3 with Altaic L1 background), 33 participants with intermediate level proficiency (14 with Altaic L1 background), and 7 participants with upper intermediate level proficiency (6 with Altaic L1 background).10 3.2

Materials and procedure

The data were collected through three paper-and-pencil tasks, each aimed at testing a particular component (syntax, semantics, pragmatics) of the linguistic competence regarding YN questions in Turkish. All three tasks were administered in the same sitting. The participants were first administered Task 1, which was followed by Tasks 2 and 3. 3.2.1 Task 1: Knowledge of syntactic constraints on YN questions Task 1 was a grammaticality rating task which tested the participants’ knowledge of the syntactic constraints that govern the placement of mI in Turkish YN questions. The task contained 18 critical items, 12 of which were grammatical as in (7), and 6 of which were ungrammatical, as in (8). (7) O kiracı dolap için para verdi mi? that tenant wardrobe for money gave Q? ‘Did that tenant give money for the wardrobe?’

are Kazakh, Meskhetian Turkish, Mongolian, Turkmen, Uyghur, and Uzbek within the Altaic group and Chinese, Hausa, and Tajik in the non-Altaic group. 10. Students at this particular language center take monthly tests that examine their reading, writing, listening, speaking, and grammar skills.

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(8) *Bu mu adam Ayşe hakkında mektup yazdı? this Q man Ayşe about letter wrote?

In the grammatical items, mI was attached to the subject, adjunct, object, or verb (3 each). In the ungrammatical items, mI was placed either on a pre-nominal DP-internal determiner, as in (8), or adjective, as in (2a), or on the complement of a post-position, as in (2b) (2 each). In order to prevent the participants from making use of particular response strategies, the task further included 18 filler items (6 grammatical, 12 ungrammatical) that tested for wh-questions with different wh-items.11 The participants were asked to read each of the sentences and indicate how grammatical they thought each sentence was on a 5-point scale (1 = completely ungrammatical, 5 = perfectly grammatical). Instructions were provided in written form in both Turkish and English to ensure accurate comprehension of the task by all participants. There was no time limit set for the task. 3.2.2 Task 2: Semantic interpretations of YN questions Task 2 was a semantic similarity rating task that was designed to test the participants’ semantic interpretations of Turkish YN questions. As discussed above, a Turkish YN question can have a wide scope reading only if mI is placed on the verb or on the immediately preverbal constituent (as in examples (3) and (4)). In all other cases, the wide scope reading is not available.12 The aim of Task 2 was to test whether the participants can recognize the placements of mI that yield wide vs. narrow scope interpretation. If they could, we expected them to recognize the fact that YN questions with mI on the verb are similar in their meaning to YN questions with mI on the immediately preverbal constituent because only these two placements of mI potentially yield wide scope interpretation. It was, therefore, expected that questions with these two placements of mI would be rated as similar 11. The reason why the number of grammatical and ungrammatical items was unequal relates to the fact that there are more grammatical than ungrammatical configurations of mI placement in Turkish YN questions (see (1) and (2) in Section 2.1). Trying to create an equal number of grammatical and ungrammatical items would, therefore, have led to an overuse of the same type of ungrammatical sentences, which would possibly have created a response bias. The balance between grammatical and ungrammatical items was ensured through the use of a higher number of ungrammatical filler items. Thus, each participant eventually rated 18 grammatical and 18 ungrammatical items. 12. A reviewer points out that a YN question may receive a wide scope reading with mI on the subject when the verb is unaccusative, due to the syntactic position into which such subjects are originally inserted (the complement of the verb). However, given that all of our experimental items contained a transitive verb, all of the subject DPs originate in the VP.



Chapter 6.  Yes/no questions in second language Turkish 175

to each other and recognized as different from questions in which mI is placed on a different constituent. The task contained 12 well-formed YN questions (main questions), all based on the same template: subject-adverb-object-transitive verb. Each main question was followed by three well-formed YN questions (options) with placements of mI different than in the main question. The participants were asked to decide how similar the meaning of each of the options is to the meaning of the main question. Six of the main questions could only yield narrow scope interpretation; in three of these six items, mI was attached to the subject and in the remaining three, mI was attached to the adverb. The remaining six main questions could potentially yield wide scope; in three of them, mI was placed on the verb and in the other three, it was placed on the object. Consider, for instance, example (9), in which the main question features mI on the subject, followed by three options in which mI is attached to the object (a), adverb (b), and verb (c). (9) Fatih mi dün ayran içti? mI on subject FATİH Q yesterday ayran drank ‘Was it Fatih who drank Ayran yesterday?’ a. Fatih dün ayran mı içti? mI on object b. Fatih dün mü ayran içti? mI on adverb c. Fatih dün ayran içti mi? mI on verb

The participants were asked to read each of the options (a, b, and c) and to indicate on a 5-point scale how similar its meaning is to the meaning of the main YN question (1 = completely unrelated, 5 = identical in meaning). No filler items were employed for this task because, rather than preventing the participants from noticing what was manipulated in the task, we thought it was desirable for our purposes that the participants compare the available options, reflect on them and make their choices based on their available knowledge (explicit or implicit). As in Task 1, instructions were provided in writing in both Turkish and English and there was no time limit for the task. 3.2.3 Task 3: Knowledge of pragmatic conditions regulating YN questions Task 3 was a pragmatic context-matching felicitousness judgment task (Rothman 2009), which tested whether the participants possessed the intuitions regarding appropriate usage of wide scope Turkish YN questions in particular situations. As mentioned earlier, when a wide scope YN question is appropriate, the choice between the placement options for mI (on the verb or on the immediately preverbal constituent) depends on the context of the situation. The question particle mI tends to be attached to the verb if the speaker is inquiring about general practices, as in (6), whereas when non-linguistic cues are available to the speaker through

176 Martina Gračanin-Yuksek and Bilal Kırkıcı

the situational context, mI is placed on the immediately preverbal constituent, as exemplified in (5). In Task 3, the participants were presented with 14 situations in Turkish and English, each followed by two Turkish wide scope YN questions: one with mI on the verb and one with mI on the immediately preverbal constituent. Half of the situations presented were constructed so as to favor the placement of mI after the verb (they described general/habitual situations), as in (10), while the other half favored the placement of mI after the immediately preverbal constituent (they described immediate situations), as in (11). (10) General/Habitual Situation John and Lucy are total strangers and meet on Facebook for the first time. Lucy is interested in John’s hobbies and asks: John ve Lucy birbirlerini hiç tanımamaktadır ve ilk kez Facebook’ta karşılaşırlar. Lucy John’un hobilerini merak eder ve sorar: a. Biraz kendinden bahset. Mesela spor yapıyor musun? (felicitous) ‘Tell me about yourself. For example, do you do sports?’ b. Biraz kendinden bahset. Mesela spor mu yapıyorsun? (infelicitous) (11) Immediate Situation Ayşe is watching TV in the living room and her mother comes in from the kitchen with tears in her eyes. Ayşe asks: Ayşe oturma odasında televizyon izlemektedir. Annesi gözlerinde yaşlarla mutfaktan gelir. Ayşe sorar: a. Ne oldu sana? Soğan pişiriyor musun? (infelicitous) ‘What happened to you? Are you cooking onions?’ b. Ne oldu sana? Soğan mı pişiriyorsun? (felicitous)

The participants were asked to judge on a 5-point scale how appropriate each of the two sentences sounded in the context they read (1 = not appropriate at all, 5 = completely appropriate). The following pairings of context and YN questions were rated by the participants: a. mI on the predicate in a context that describes a general/habitual situation (General/Predicate)  (felicitous) b. mI on the immediately preverbal constituent in a context that describes a general/habitual situation (General/Preverbal)  (infelicitous) c. mI on the predicate in a context that describes an immediate situation (Immediate/Predicate) (infelicitous) d. mI on the immediately preverbal constituent in a context that describes an immediate situation (Immediate/Preverbal) (felicitous)

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As in Tasks 1 and 2, instructions were provided in writing in both Turkish and English and there was no set time limit for the task. 4. Results This section is divided into three subparts that correspond to the three tasks presented in the previous section. 4.1

Results of the grammaticality rating task (Task 1)

The rating scores of Task 1 were first examined using descriptive statistical analysis. The mean scores and standard deviation values across the four participant groups are presented in Table 1 and Figure 1. The L1 control participants generally accepted the grammatical sentences (mean: 4.56, SD: .55) and rejected the ungrammatical ones (mean: 1.61, SD: .52). A similar pattern was found for the L2 participants, with overall higher ratings for the grammatical sentences and lower ratings for ungrammatical sentences (see Table 1). The data were submitted to a repeated measures ANOVA with the factors ‘Group’ (L2 elementary, L2 intermediate, L2 upper intermediate and L1 control) as between-participants factor and ‘Grammaticality’ (grammatical, ungrammatical) as within-participants factor, which revealed a main effect of ‘Grammaticality’ (F(1,83) = 408.159, p < .0001) indicating that the grammatical and ungrammatical sentences were rated differently, but no main effect of ‘Group’ (F(3,83) = 1.601, p  =  .195). The results further yielded a significant interaction between ‘Grammaticality’ and ‘Group’ (F(3,83) = 45.694, p < .0001), reflecting differences in the grammaticality ratings among the groups. Paired-sample t-tests were conducted to unpack the ‘Group’ by ‘Grammaticality’ interaction and all groups were found to significantly differentiate between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences (L1 controls: t(31) = 27.649, p  1], a main effect of Condition emerged [F(2,78) = 5.678, p