Processing of Lexical Aspect in Turkish

Date

2026-7-20

Author

Yıldırım, Hilal

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This dissertation investigates the lexical aspectual organization of Turkish verbs and its consequences for sentence processing through two studies. Study 1 used an offline rating task with 64 native speakers to classify 108 Turkish verbs along punctivity, iterativity, and durativity dimensions. Hierarchical Clustering on Principal Components revealed three unequally coherent verb classes as punctive, iterative, and durative. The punctive class showed the strongest boundaries while the iterative was the most heterogeneous, consistent with the theoretical expectation that iterativity is a derived rather than primitive aspectual category. These results support an endpoint-first hierarchical model in which endpoint property is the primary organizing principle and agentivity is secondary. This empirically validated classification, the first of its kind for Turkish, informed verb stimulus selection for Study 2, grounding the experiment in data-driven rather than assumed aspectual categories. Study 2 used a cross-modal semantic classification task with 62 participants to examine whether aspectual classifications from Study 1 modulate processing costs in coercion conditions. A significant verb type x adverb type interaction revealed an asymmetric pattern. While durative adverbial and punctive verb combinations produced significant processing costs, the reverse combination with a punctive adverb and durative verb did not. A follow-up interpretation survey indicated that the latter condition is resolved through an entailed onset reading rather than coercion. These findings challenge accounts predicting uniform coercion costs and support a hierarchically sensitive view in which the cost of aspectual mismatch resolution depends on the primacy of the violated aspectual feature.

Subject Keywords

aspectual coercion, Turkish, sentence processing, lexical aspect, endpoint-first model

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/119998

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis