Wh-Argument/Adjunct Asymmetry in Sentence Processing

This study investigates the processing of complex sentences with wh-phrases trying to point out whether the proposals stating that arguments are processed easier than adjuncts work for wh-phrases in case of Turkish. A wh-argument and a wh-adjunct were used in two eye-tracking experiments with two word orders, and two embedded verb types as the variables. The orders and the type of the embedded verbs were the same in each experiment to provide the wh-phrase type to be the main variable to compare. The general outcome of the study showed that wh-argument was processed more quickly than wh-adjunct supporting the diversification proposed by both formal and experimental approaches in terms of argument adjunct distinction. In a particular condition, in which the subcategorization features of the embedded verb mismatched with the number of arguments, the processing of wh-adjunct was faster than wh-argument. This seems to support a verb-oriented approach in licensing the scrambled wh-phrases

Tümce İşlemlemede Ne-Üyesi/Eklentisi Asimetrisi

Bu çalışma, üyelerin eklentilerden daha hızlı işlemlendiğini belirten önermelerin ne-öbekleri için de Türkçe bağlamında geçerli olup olmadığını ortaya çıkartmayı amaçlayarak ne-öbeği içeren karmaşık tümcelerin işlemlenmesini inceler. Çalışmada iki göz-izleme deneyinde, bir ne-üyesi ve bir ne-eklentisi, diğer değişkenler olan iki farklı sözcük dizilişi ve iki tür yantümce eylemiyle (geçişli ve çift geçişli) birlikte kullanılmıştır. Neöbeğinin türünün karşılaştırılacak başlıca değişken olması için, her iki deneyde de aynı tür yantümce eylemleri ve aynı sözcük dizilişi tekrar kullanılmıştır. Çalışmanın genel sonucu ne-üyesinin ne-eklentisinden daha hızlı işlemlendiğini göstererek formal ve deneysel yaklaşımlar tarafından üye ve eklenti üzerine öne sürülen farklılığı destekler niteliktedir. Yantümce eyleminin altulamlama özelliklerinin üye sayısıyla eşleşmediği özel bir koşulda ise ne-eklentisi ne-üyesinden daha hızlı işlemlenmiştir. Bu da yer değiştiren ne-öbeklerinin lisanslanmasında eylem-odaklı bir yaklaşımı destekler niteliktedir

___

Adger, D. (2004). Core Syntax. A Minimalist Aproach, Oxford University Press, NY. Akal, T. (2014). Eye-tracking analysis of the processing of Turkish complex sentences wth wh-phrases. Journal of Faculty of Letters, 31 (1), 1 - 22.

Akar, D. (1990). Wh-questions in Turkish. M.A. Thesis. Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey.

Carnie, A. (2007). Syntax: A generative introduction, 2nd Edition, Blackwell Publishing.

Uzun, N.E. (2000). Ana çizgileriyle evrensel dilbilgisi ve Türkçe. İstanbul: Multilingual.

Steapanov, A., and Stateva, P. (2015). Cross-linguistic evidence for memory storage costs in filler gap dependencies with wh-adjuncts. Frontiers in Psycholinguistics, 6, 1 – 19.

Smiecinska, J. (2001). Towards a minimalist analysis of the argument-adjunct asymmetries in English. Poznan Studies in Contemporary Linguistics, 37, 195 – 209.

Sabel, J. (2002). A minimalist analysis of syntactic islands. The Linguistic Review, 19, 271 – 315.

Rayner, K., and Pollatsek, A. (2006). Eye movement control in reading. M. J. Traxler and M. A. Gernsbacher (Eds.). Handbook of Psycholinguistics, 2nd Edition (pp.613 –657). Elsevier.

Rayner, K., and Juhasz, B. (2006). Reading processes in adults. K. Brown. (Ed.). In Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (pp.373 – 378). Elsevier.

Rayner, K. (1998). Eye movements in reading and information processing: 20 years of research. Psychological Bulletin, 124 (3), 372 – 422.

Radford, A. (1988). Transformational Grammar: A first course. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Özsoy, S. (2009). Turkish as a (non)-wh-in-situ language. E. A. Csato, G. Ims, J. Parslow, F. Thiesen, E. Türker (Eds.). In Turcological Letters to Bernt Brendemoen, 221 – 232. Oslo: Novus Forlag.

Özsoy, S. (1996). A’ dependencies in Turkish. B. Rona (Ed.). Current Issues in Turkish Linguistics, Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, 15 – 17 August, 1990, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1, 139-158. Hitit Yayınevi, Ankara.

O’Grady, W., Lee, M., and Choo, M. (2003). A subject–object asymmetry in the acquisition of relative clauses in Korean as a second language. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25, 433–448.

Miyagawa, S. (2003). Wh-in-situ and scrambling in the context of comparative Altaic syntax. Paper Presented at WAFL 1 (Workshop in Altaic Formal Linguistics, MIT).

Meseguer, E., Carreiras, M., and Clifton, C. Jr. (2002). Overt reanalysis strategies and eye movements during the reading of mild garden path sentences. Memory and Cognition, 30 (4), 551 – 561.

MacDonald, M., Pearlmutter, N. J., and Seidenberg, M. S. (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676 – 703.

Liversedge, S. P., Pickering, M. J., Clayes, E. L., and Branigan, H. P. (2003). Thematic processing of adjuncts: Evidence from eye-tracking experiment. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 10 (3), 667 -675.

Liversedge, S. P., and Findlay, J. M. (2000). Saccadic eye movements and cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4 (1), 6 – 14.

Liversedge, S. P., Pickering, M. J., Branigan, H. P., and van Gompel, R. P. G. (1998). Processing arguments and adjuncts in isolation and context: The case of by-phrase ambiguities in passives, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 24, 461 – 475.

Kornfilt, J. (2003). Scrambling, subscrambling, and case in Turkish. S. Karimi (Ed.). in Word Order and Scrambling (pp.125 – 155). Blackwell Publishing.

Kornfilt, J. (1996). On some infinitival wh-constructions in Turkish. Dilbilim Araştırmaları, 192 - 215.

Kennison, S. M. (2002). Comprehending noun phrase arguments and adjuncts, Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 31 (1), 65 – 81.

İşsever, S. (2003). Information structure in Turkish: the word order-prosody interface. Lingua, 113, 1025 – 1053.

Huang, J. (1982). Logical relations in Chinese and the theory of grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation.

Hofmeister, P., and Sag, I. A. (2010). Cognitive constraints and island effects. Language, 86 (2), 366 – 415.

Hawkins, J. A. (1999). Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars. Language, 75, (2), 244 – 285.

Haegeman, L. (1992). Introduction to Government and Binding Theory, Blackwell.

Görgülü, E. (2006). Variable wh-words in Turkish. MA Thesis, Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey.

Göksel, A., Kelepir M., and Üntak-Tarhan, A. (2007). Türkçe soru cümlelerinde ezgi. Y. Aksan, and M. Aksan (Eds.). 21. Ulusal Dilbilim Kurultayı Bildirileri, 309 – 316. Mersin.

Göksel, A., and Özsoy, S. (2000). Is there a focus position in Turkish? A. Göksel and C. Kerslake (Eds.) in Studies on Turkish and Turkic Languages; Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, 219 - 228. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Gibson, E. (2000). The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity. In Image, language, brain, (Eds.) Y. Miyashita, A. Marantz & W. O’Neil, 95–126. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition 68:1–76.

Garrod, S. (2006). Psycholinguistic Research Methods. Keith Brown (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition (251 – 257). Elsevier.

Frenck-Mestre, C. (2005). Eye-movement recording as a tool for studying syntactic processing in a second language: a review of methodologies and experimental findings. Second Language Research, 21 (2), 175 – 198.

Frazier, L., and Rayner, K. (1982). Making and correcting errors during sentence comprehension: eye movements in the analysis of structurally ambiguous sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 14, 178 – 210.

Ferretti, T. R., McCrae, K., and Hatherall, A. (2001). Integrating verbs, situation schemas and thematic role concepts, Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 516 –547.

Erguvanlı, E. (1984). The Function of Word Order in Turkish Grammar. University of California Publications.

Çakır, S. (2015). Island constraints in Turkish: A grammaticality judgment study. Ankara Papers in Turkish and Turkic Linguistics, 68-76.

Clifton, C., Speer, S., and S. P. Abney. (1991). Parsing arguments: Phrase structure and argument structure as determinants of initial parsing decisions. Journal of Memory and Language, 30-2, 251 – 271.

Chomsky, N. (1995). The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Bozşahin, C., and Göksel, A. (2007). Türkçede ezgi: Sözdizim ve edimle ilişkisi. Y. Aksan, M. Aksan (Eds.), in 21. Ulusal Dilbilim Kurultayı Bildirileri, 10 – 11 Mayıs, 2007 (1 – 5). Mersin.

Boland, J. E., and Boehm – Jernigan, H. (1998). Lexical constraints and prepositional phrase attachment. Journal of Memory and Language, 39, 684 – 719.

Boland, J. E., M. K. Tanenhaus, S. M. Garnsey, and G. N. Carlson. (1995). Verb argument structure in parsing and interpretation: Evidence from wh-questions, Journal of Memory and Language, 34, 774 – 806.

Arslan, C. (1999). Approaches to Wh-Structures in Turkish, M.A. Thesis. Boğaziçi University, İstanbul, Turkey.

Akar, D. (2000). Wh-questions in Turkish. Rona, B. (Ed.), in Current Issues in Turkish Linguistics volume II (pp.67 – 74). Ankara: Hitit Publications.

Akal, T. (2014). Eye-tracking analysis of the processing of Turkish complex sentences wth wh-phrases. Journal of Faculty of Letters, 31 (1), 1 – 22.

Adger, D. (2004). Core Syntax. A Minimalist Aproach, Oxford University Press, NY.