This study was aimed at exploring the key factors affecting postgraduate students-teachers' translation of a theoretical framework from English into their native language. The research was carried out with 21 Turkish postgraduate students who were also mathematics teachers, based on the theoretical framework of the documentational approach to…

Negation is a cornerstone of human language and one of the few universals found in all languages. Without negation, neither categorization nor efficient communication would be possible. Languages, however, differ remarkably in how they express negation. It is yet widely unknown how the way negation is marked influences the acquisition process of…

As in teaching other languages, the most difficult of the four basic skills in teaching Turkish as a foreign language is writing; it includes very different strategies from sequencing to analysis and synthesis. In addition, foreign language learners tend to transfer the forms and meanings of their own culture and language to the target language…

Adjectival participles have been classified by their syntactic and semantic functions in many languages. Among the semantic functions, it is proposed that "reversible/irreversible interpretation" of those forms have a distinctive property. Like English, German, Greek and Turkish, it is claimed that Japanese adjectival forms have…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

This dissertation examines primarily the syntactic, but also the semantic/pragmatic behavior of sentential complement clauses in Turkish and proposes a new classification of such complements. A head-final language, Turkish lacks an overt, lexical complementizer akin to English "that". The most frequent types of sentential complementation…

To what extent can second language (L2) speakers acquire a syntactic representation for an L2 structure absent in the first language (L1)? Findings from L2 structural priming studies are in conflict inasmuch as evidence for and against continuity between L1 and L2 sentence production has been shown. Furthermore, previous investigations have not…

Variability in the form of article (i.e., a and the) omissions and stressing has been attributed to a mismatch between first (L1) and second language (L2) prosodic and syntactic structures. An overlap between the L1 and L2 systems, on the other hand, is expected to contribute to native-like article productions. This case study aims to explore the…

It has been observed that data-based translation programs are often used both in and outside the class unconsciously and thus there occurs many problems in foreign language learning and teaching. To draw attention to this problem, with this study, whether the program has satisfactory results or not has been revealed by making translations from…

This dissertation concerns the acquisition of the interaction between lexicosemantic properties of verbs and syntax, focusing on symmetrical and asymmetrical verbs in different syntactic structures. Based on linguistic evidence, it is shown that two conceptual categories, Mutuality and Number, interact to give rise to four event-types: Single…

This dissertation contains three studies that investigate whether attested patterns of constituent order distribution and change in the world's languages can be attributed, in part, to cognitive preferences for some constituent orders over others. To assess these preferences, seven experiments employed an "elicited pantomime" task.…

This study investigates the issue of crosslinguistic influence in the domain of subject realization in Turkish in simultaneous acquisition of Turkish and English. The use of subjects in a null subject language like Turkish is a phenomenon linked to the pragmatics-syntax interface of the grammar and, thus, is a domain where crosslinguistic…

Turkish as spoken in the Netherlands (NL-Turkish) sounds "different" (unconventional) to Turkish speakers in Turkey (TR-Turkish). We claim that this is due to structural contact-induced change that is, however, located within specific lexically complex units copied from Dutch. This article investigates structural change in NL-Turkish…

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the…

This volume, dedicated to Professor Robert B. Lees on the occasion of his departure from the University of Illinois, contains 15 papers on a variety of linguistic topics: C. L. Baker, "Problems of Polarity in Counterfactuals"; Lawrence F. Bouton, "Do So: Do+Adverb"; Chin-chuan Cheng, "Domains of Phonological Rule Application"; Joseph F. Foster,…