The present study focuses on long distance scrambling and operator movement from embedded clauses to sentence initial position in Turkish. It proposes that the scrambling of the arguments out of the complement clauses is possible due to the fact that such phrases move cyclically through phases in Turkish. It is also asserted that the adjuncts that…

In Turkish, Relative Clause (RC) attachment ambiguity arises when two noun phrases (NPs) in a genitive construction follow the (RC). The present paper studies Turkish RC attachment preferences of Turkish native speakers in two experiments through off-line comprehension tasks. While in the first experiment the main verb immediately follows the NP…

This paper investigates a number of issues regarding negative polarity items (NPIs henceforth), the scope of negation and other negative elements in Turkish. First, based on new data, I argue that the distribution of the adverbial NPI "sakin" 'ever' is not as restricted as it was claimed in previous work (cf. Kelepir 2000, 2001). That's,…

This article adopts the surface overlap and derivational complexity hypotheses to study crosslinguistic transfer in the adult second language (L2) acquisition of English genitive alternation (between the s-genitives and the of genitives) by intermediate and advanced Egyptian Arabic-speaking learners. While the "s"-genitive (e.g.…

This study reports findings from two truth value judgment experiments to address two research questions on Mandarin: (i) whether children and adults have the knowledge of the structural constraint Principle C in their pronoun resolution; and (ii) whether adults and children show the prohibition effect of the cyclic-c-command constraint or the QR…

Wh-questions have been widely discussed in different languages such as English, Mandarin Chinese, Italian, and Russian, but little attention has been paid to the structure of wh-questions in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Thus, this dissertation attempts to analyze the structure of wh-questions using the current frameworks: "Minimalism and…

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…

In this dissertation I set out to solve a series of puzzles related to the notion of a DP periphery, defined as an area around the edge of a given domain targeted by operations such as movement and agreement. In solving these puzzles, I argue for a peripheral area in the nominal domain. Early arguments for a peripheral boundary in the nominal…

This dissertation examines complementizer agreement (CA) phenomena in which phi-features appear on a complementizer, clause-linking marker, or otherwise, syntactically speaking, at the C[superscript 0] position. This dissertation will argue that CA is in fact a straightforward output of the syntax module under standard Minimalist assumptions, and…

Minimalism in grammatical theorizing (Chomsky in "The minimalist program." MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995) led to simpler linguistic devices and a better focalization of the core properties of the structure building engine: a lexicon and a free (recursive) phrase formation operation, dubbed Merge, are the basic components that serve in…

Comparative correlatives, like "the longer you stay out in the rain, the colder you'll get," are prolific in the world's languages (i.e., there is no evidence of a language that lacks comparative correlatives). Despite this observation, the data do not present a readily apparent syntax. What is the relationship between the two clauses?…

This dissertation concerns the interaction of syntax and information structure in Mandarin Chinese and puts the theoretical assumption of parallelism between clauses and noun phrases to the test. It examines and validates the information structural status of the object phrases preposed to clause-internal positions. I argue that Rizzi's (1997)…

This dissertation maps the left-periphery of the Russian language, presenting a new geometry of Russian main and subordinate clauses in order to account for a number of phenomena: single and multiple wh-constructions, sluicing constructions, and coordinate multiple wh-constructions (CMW), as well as to predict various occurring word-orders.…

In this dissertation, I examine the interpretation of NP-ellipsis (henceforth, NPE) in Korean. Some unexpected interpretive and grammatical contrasts arise in Korean between pro-forms such as "caki" "self" and "ku" "'3.S.M" (~"he") in object position and their null counterparts in NPE…

An essential task for the morphosyntactic level within the grammatical component of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG) is the handling of constituent ordering. This area of grammar, which is known as positional syntax, constitutes the subject of the present paper, in which the ordering of constituents is examined within the framework of a dynamic…