Production of relative clauses in monolingual Turkish children

Research on the production of relative clauses (RCs) has shown that in English, although children start using intransitive RCs at an earlier age, more complex, bi-propositional object RCs appear later (Hamburger & Crain, 1982; Diessel and Tomasello, 2005), and children use resumptive pronouns both in acceptable and unacceptable ways (McKee, McDaniel, & Snedeker, 1998; McKee & McDaniel, 2001). To date, it is unclear whether or not the same picture emerges in Turkish, a language with an SOV word-order and overt case marking. Some studies suggested that subject RCs are more frequent in adults and children (Slobin, 1986) and yield a better performance than object RCs (Özcan, 1996), but others reported the opposite pattern (Ekmekçi, 1990). Our study addresses this issue in Turkish children and adults, and uses participants’ errors to account for the emerging asymmetry between subject and object RCs. 37 5-to-8 year old monolingual Turkish children and 23 adult controls participated in a novel elicitation task involving cards, each consisting of four different pictures (see Figure 1). There were two sets of cards, one for the participant and one for the researcher. The former had animals with accessories (e.g., a hat) whereas the latter had no accessories. Participants were instructed to hold their card without showing it to the researcher and describe the animals with particular accessories. This prompted the use of subject and object RCs. The researcher had to identify the animals in her card (see Figure 2). A preliminary repeated measures ANOVA with the factor Group (pre-school, primary-school children) showed no differences between the groups in the use of RCs (p>.1), who were therefore collapsed into one for further analyses. A repeated measures ANOVA with the factors Group (children, adults) and RC-Type (Subject, Object) showed that children used fewer RCs than adults (F(1,58)=7.54, p<.01), and both groups used fewer object than subject RCs (F(1,58)=22.46, p<.001), but there was no Group by RC-Type interaction (see Figure 3). A similar ANOVA on the rate of grammatical RCs showed a main effect of Group (F(1,58)=77.25, p<.001), a main effect of RC-Type (F(1,58)=66.33, p<.001), and an interaction of Group by RC-Type (F(1,58)=64.6, p<.001) (see Figure 4). Children made more errors than adults in object RCs (F(1,58)=87.01, p<.001), and children made more errors in object compared to subject RCs (F(1,36)=106.35, p<.001), but adults did not show this asymmetry. The error analysis revealed that children systematically avoided the object-relativizing morpheme –DIK, which requires possessive agreement with the genitive-marked subject. They also used resumptive pronouns and resumptive full-DPs in the extraction site similarly to English children (see Figure 5). These findings are in line with Slobin (1986) and Özcan (1996). Children’s errors suggest that they avoid morphosyntactic complexity of object RCs and try to preserve the canonical word order by inserting resumptive pronouns in the extraction site. Finally, cross-linguistic similarity in the acquisition of RCs in typologically different languages suggests a higher accessibility of subject RCs both at the structural (Keenan and Comrie, 1977) and conceptual level (Bock and Warren, 1986)

RUNS IN FOLKTALES AND THE DYNAMICS OF TURKISH RUNS - A CASE-STUDY

Runs are inherent to Turkish folktales, as they are to folktales of certain other cultures. They are traditionally accepted forms, and useful compositional devices that function as bridges between the world of the tale and the world of everyday reality. This study attempts to demonstrate the dynamics of runs through an examination of the stylistic techniques that narrators employ, showing in particular how surface morphology and syntax help narrators to encode the traditional function and the meaning of runs. It argues that there are also extralinguistic factors contributing to the dynamics of runs, namely the common cultural background of the narrator and the audience, and suggests that runs act as cognitive signals for the audience to activate its previously acquired knowledge of the folktale world. The analysis tries to show that runs are not used merely for their compositional utility and do not restrict the narrator, but are effective means by which the narrator can manipulate the audience's outlook on the tale

Göstergebilim, Söylem Çözümlemesi ve Anlatı İncelemesi

Anlatılar, örneğin söylenler, masallar, öyküler, hem söylem çözümlemesinin hem de göstergebilimin ilgisini çeken söylem türleridir. Gerek göstergebilim, gerekse söylem çözümlemesi anlatılan dikkatle incelenmiş, ve bu metin türünün çeşitli yönlerini açığa çıkarmaya çalışmıştır. Bu yazıda amaç, yapılan çalışmaların bir özet değerlendirmesini yapmak, ve bu iki değişik alanın anlatılann anlaşılmasına yaptığı katkılan karşılaştırarak açığa çıkarmaktır. Ancak şu noktanın gözden kaçınlmaması gerekiyor: Göstergebilim, bir yazın ürünü olan anlatı türünü incelemiş, söylem çözümlemesi ise, özellikle sözlü anlatıların incelenmesine ağırlık vermiştir. Bir başka deyişle, göstergebilim, yukarda sıralanan iyi tasarlanmış söylem türlerini incelerken, söylem çözümlemesi daha çok tasarlanmamış, doğaçtan ve sözlü anlatılar üzerinde durmuştur

Eylemlerle Anlatılar

Anlatı söylemini çözümlerken gelişim çizgisini aktaran tümceleri incelemek bize anlatı hakkında bir çok şey söyler. Tümcelerin yapı taşlarından olan eylemleri de dikkatle incelemek gerekir. Bu çalışmamızda, yaygın bir anlatı türü olan masallar ele alınacak, ve eylemlerin masal gelişim çizgisine katkıları araştırılacaktır. Burada varacağımız sonuçlar, diğer anlatı türlerinin anlaşılmasına da katkıda bulunur düşüncesindeyiz. Çalışmanın veri tabanını, Boratav (1969), Günay (1975), ve Korkmaz ( 1963)'de bulunan 15 civarında Türk masalı oluşturmaktadır. Bu masalların söylemi çeşitli açılardan incelenmiş, ve eylemlerin masala önemli katkılarda bulunduğu gözlenmiştir. Bu çalışmada Boratav (1969)'da bulunan, daha önce incelemediğimiz bir masal incelenerek eylemlerin anlatıdaki işlevi araştırılacaktır

Multilingual Extension of PDTB-Style Annotation: The Case of TED Multilingual Discourse Bank

We introduce TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank, a corpus of TED talks transcripts in 6 languages (English, German, Polish, EuropeanPortuguese, Russian and Turkish), where the ultimate aim is to provide a clearly described level of discourse structure and semanticsin multiple languages. The corpus is manually annotated following the goals and principles of PDTB, involving explicit and implicitdiscourse connectives, entity relations, alternative lexicalizations and no relations. In the corpus, we also aim to capture the character-istics of spoken language that exist in the transcripts and adapt the PDTB scheme according to our aims; for example, we introducehypophora. We spot other aspects of spoken discourse such as the discourse marker use of connectives to keep them distinct from theirdiscourse connective use. TED-MDB is, to the best of our knowledge, one of the few multilingual discourse treebanks and is hoped tobe a source of parallel data for contrastive linguistic analysis as well as language technology applications. We describe the corpus, theannotation procedure and provide preliminary corpus statistics.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

METU Turkish Discourse Bank Browser

In this paper, the METU Turkish Discourse Bank Browser, a tool developed for browsing the annotated annotated discourse relations in Middle East Technical University (METU) Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB) project is presented. The tool provides both a clear interface for browsing the annotated corpus and a wide range of search options to analyze the annotations

Turkish Discourse Bank: Porting a discourse annotation style to a morphologically rich language

This paper briefly describes the Turkish Discourse Bank, the first publicly available annotated discourse resource for Turkish. It focuses on the challenges posed by annotating Turkish, a free word order language with rich inflectional and derivational morphology. It shows the usefulness of the PDTB style annotation but points out the need to expand this annotation style with the needs of the target language

A Discourse Resource for Turkish: Annotating Discourse Connectives in the METU Corpus

This paper describes first steps towards extending the METU Turkish Corpus from a sentence-level language resource to a discourse-level resource by annotating its discourse connectives and their arguments. The project is based on the same principles as the Penn Discourse TreeBank (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pdtb) and is supported by TUBITAK, The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey. We first present the goals of the project and the METU Turkish corpus. We then describe how we decided what to take as explicit discourse connectives and the range of syntactic classes they come from. With representative examples of each class, we examine explicit connectives, their linear ordering, and types of syntactic units that can serve as their arguments. We then touch upon connectives with respect to free word order in Turkish and punctuation, as well as the important issue of how much material is needed to specify an argument. We close with a brief discussion of current plans

The annotation scheme of the Turkish Discourse Bank and an evaluation of inconsistent annotations

In this paper, we report on the annotation procedures we developed for annotating the Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB), an effort that extends the Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB) annotation style by using it for annotating Turkish discourse. After a brief introduction to the TDB, we describe the annotation cycle and the annotation scheme we developed, defining which parts of the scheme are an extension of the PDTB and which parts are different. We provide inter-coder reliability calculations on the first and second arguments of some connectives and discuss the most important sources of disagreement among annotators