Project Details
Projekt
Clause combining and word order in heritage Turkish across majority languages
Applicant
Professor Dr. Christoph Schroeder
Subject Area
General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
Term
from 2018 to 2021
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313607803
This project contributes the investigation of the dynamics of Turkish to RUEG’s common research framework. We focus on two grammatical domains. One is the postverbal position, which underlies particular restrictions imposed by the canonical SOV syntax. The other is the grammatical domain of clause combining, where clause combining is understood as a superordinate term referring to any linguistic means of connecting and/or embedding clauses. The two grammatical domains of Turkish we choose to investigate within the frame of the research unit serve particularly well for the joint ventures envisaged. Both have been shown to develop new systematicities in settings of language contact, which are to be investigated in the Joint Venture I (JVI) of RUEG. At the same time, both domains are particularly sensitive towards register differences, thus they provide ideal ground for answering the question of whether new systematicities should be related to internal dynamics (JVI) or to contact-induced change (JVIII). In the use of the postverbal position and thus with respect to the project’s attention to that position, the considerations that play decisive roles next to core syntactic aspects are 1. interface aspects of definiteness and specificity (internal syntax-semantic interface) and 2. aspects of topichood and givenness (external interface with information structure and discourse). With regard to clause combining, we deal with a grammatical domain which is shaped by syntactic aspects such as properties of embedding. At the same time, aspects of fore- and backgrounding (interface with discourse) enter the picture (JVII). The contrastive setting of the RUEG serves particularly well for investigations of possible contact-induced changes in the two domains, as we can establish ‘minimal pairs’, so to speak: in the domain of clause combining, there are more parallels between English and Turkish than between German and Turkish, and in the domain of word order, the situation is the reverse; there are more parallels between German and Turkish than between English and Turkish (JVIII). RUEG’s unified methodology will enable us to compare across different registers and different contact settings, and we will complement this with further elicited data and with experimental techniques. P4’s results will be related to the results of other RUEG projects, in particular to the results on the common topic of word order. The particular aspects which P4 contributes to RUEG concern the focus on Turkish as a heritage language, the focus on register differences (together with P1), and the additional aspect of clause combining.
DFG Programme
Research Units
International Connection
Netherlands, Turkey, USA
