Psycholinguistic investigations on the non-local referential properties of<i> kendisi</i> and<i> o</i>

Date

2024-01-01

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Demir, Orhan
Gracanın Yüksek, Martına
Kırkıcı, Bilal

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This paper aims to test the referential properties of the Turkish anaphors kendisi 'self' and o 'he/she/it'. The literature suggests that both kendisi and o can refer to long-distance and extrasentential antecedents (e.g. Kornfilt 2001, Goksel & Kerslake 2005). Two experiments were conducted to test the validity of this claim. In both, we tested the referential possibilities of the anaphors kendisi and o when they function as embedded objects. This study thus complements G & uuml;rel (2002, 2004), where the same anaphors were used as embedded subjects. The first experiment (an acceptability judgment task), in which participants were biased towards either a long-distance or an extrasentential antecedent via appropriately structured contexts, showed that a long-distance antecedent was favored almost equally by both kendisi and o, but neither was readily interpreted as co-referential with an extrasentential antecedent, although o was rated significantly higher than kendisi. These findings prompted us to further investigate participants' preferences when referring to extrasentential antecedents. We speculated that the number of potential antecedents within a sentence influenced participants' preferences. If this was the case, the higher rating of o compared to kendisi in extrasentential contexts would be expected, since the number of potential intra-sentential antecedents was higher for kendisi than for o (since kendisi can refer to both local and longdistance antecedents). Keeping the rest of the experimental design identical to the first experiment, in our second acceptability-judgment task we manipulated the number of accessible antecedents preceding kendisi/o in the experimental sentences to give prominence to the extrasentential antecedents. The analyses showed higher ratings for both anaphors when the number of potential linguistic antecedents before kendisi and o decreased. The results are discussed with reference to the theoretical assumptions and possible future directions.

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https://hdl.handle.net/11511/116359

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Department of Foreign Language Education, Article