Negative Dependencies and Intervention Effects in Turkish

2024-9-06
Karataş, Batuhan
There are two main goals of this study: (i) to understand the descriptive properties of the negative dependencies (e.g. hiçbir, any, ever) in Turkish, which are basically expressions that require some kind of negation in a given structure (Giannakidou and Zeijlstra, 2017; Giannakidou, 2020; Zeijlstra, 2016, 2022); and (ii) to understand the so-called intervention effects (Linebarger (1980, 1987); Guerzoni (2006); Chierchia (2004, 2013); among others) on negative dependencies in Turkish, which, excluding the work of Kelepir (2001), seems to have gone largely unnoticed in Turkish literature on negative dependencies. To give an account for the problem of intervention effects, we will adopt the scalar implicatures approach based on the work of Chierchia (2004, 2013), which essentially proposes that the presence of some elements (e.g. universal quantifier, coordination, etc.) may disturb the licensing environment for negative dependents even when there is a valid licensor. Although the theory has some shortcomings, especially regarding the licensing of negative dependencies under question structures, we will observe that the scalar implicatures theory is able to account for a considerable fragment of intervention data in Turkish.
Citation Formats
B. Karataş, “Negative Dependencies and Intervention Effects in Turkish,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2024.