Verbal Categories in Turkish Sign Language

2016-01-01
This study is a preliminary investigation of verb classes in Turkish Sign Language (TiD), and how they can be captured in a lexicalized generative grammar. TiD manifests an array of verb classes, as in other sign languages: plain verbs, single/double agreement verbs, and spatial verbs. Syntactic categorisation of these verb classes is a challenge to any linguistic theory because it involves multi-modal features (manual and nonmanual signs), a relativistic pronominal reference scheme, an unorthodox morphology for signs and iconicity. We start our investigation with directionality (and grammatical relations) because they are considered to be basic for understanding syntactic asymmetries, as Ross (1967) and subsequent research has shown for coordination and extraction. Rather than confining ourselves to single clauses without embedding, we investigate syntactic constructions and try to determine word order and directionality. An important assumption in this approach is that directionality can be captured in the lexicon, in the lexical categories of verbs, as a systematic combinatory property of argument-taking entities such as verbs, under the guidance of an invariant Universal Grammar (Steedman 1996, 2000). The question then becomes testing the hypotheses on directionality of verbs by looking at syntactic constructions that depend on verbal categories coming from the lexicon.

Suggestions

Grammatical relations and word order ın Turkish Sign Language (TİD)
Sevinç, Ayça Müge; Bozşahin, Hüseyin Cem; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2006)
This thesis aims at investigating the grammatical relations in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). For this aim, word order, nominal morphology, and agreement morphology of verbs are examined. TİD lacks morphological case, but it has a very rich pronominal system like other sign languages. Verbs are classified according to their morphosyntactic features. With this classification, we can observe the effect of word order and agreement morphology on the grammatical relations. Combinatory Categorial Grammar as a lexic...
Syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English
Başer, Zeynep; Hohenberger, Annette Edeltraud; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2018)
The purpose of this study is to investigate the syntactic priming of relative clause attachment in monolingual Turkish speakers and Turkish learners of English with different levels of proficiency in English. Turkish and English belong to typologically different groups of languages. Within the scope of this study, we investigate syntactic priming of relative clause attachments, which enables us to examine and compare the strategies employed for ambiguity resolution both in Turkish and English. The data was ...
EFL learners’ use of path elements in motion event expressions : a study on Turkish university students
İşler, Zeynep Nur; Zeyrek Bozşahin, Deniz; Department of English Literature (2014)
The study investigates spoken and written path of motion use of Turkish university level EFL learners at Pre-Intermediate and Upper Intermediate levels of proficiency. The aim of the study is to examine whether the Talmyan (1985) typology holds for EFL learners. This typology categorizes Turkish as a verb-framed language and English as a satellite-framed language. A written task and a spoken task are used. The results of the written production task supported the Talmyan typology: there was a significant lan...
American English, Turkish and interlanguage refusals: a cross-cultural communication and interlanguage pragmatics study
Şahin, Sevgi; Hatipoğlu, Çiler; Department of English Language Teaching (2011)
This study investigates the refusal realizations of native speakers of American English (AE), Turkish (TUR) and Turkish learners of English with advanced level of proficiency (TRE). It aims to uncover the refusal strategies of young AE, TUR and TRE in conversations between equals and also to uncover if the learners display pragmatic transfer in their refusal strategies. In addition to this, the extent to which the social variables of level of closeness and refusal eliciting acts affect the refusal productio...
An analysis of turkish sign language (tid) phonology and morphology
Kubuş, Okan; Hohenberger, Annette Edeltraud; Department of Cognitive Sciences (2008)
This thesis examines the phonology and morphology of Turkish Sign Language (TİD). TİD, being considered a full-fledged language, has a rich phonological and morphological system, as other sign and spoken languages do. For the purpose of this thesis; empirical data have been collected by means of a corpus study and various data elicitation tasks. As a main result of my study of TİD phonology, I propose a complete inventory of handshapes as well as a set of unmarked handshapes which are unique to TİD. I discu...
Citation Formats
H. C. Bozşahin, Verbal Categories in Turkish Sign Language. 2016, p. 229.