The Role of Animacy in Turkish Relative Clause Production and Distribution

Uzunca A., AKAL T.

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, cilt.52, sa.6, ss.2517-2544, 2023 (SSCI) identifier identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 52 Sayı: 6
  • Basım Tarihi: 2023
  • Doi Numarası: 10.1007/s10936-023-10010-3
  • Dergi Adı: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, IBZ Online, Periodicals Index Online, Communication & Mass Media Index, Communication Abstracts, ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Linguistic Bibliography, Linguistics & Language Behavior Abstracts, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Psycinfo
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.2517-2544
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Animacy effect, Conceptual accessibility, Language production, Turkish relative clauses
  • Hacettepe Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

Relative clause (RC) production has been a major tool used for understanding language production mechanism in experimental linguistics. The present study analyzes language production mechanisms in Turkish by utilizing animacy effect on RC production. A picture description task was applied to two participant groups. The data were combined and analyzed to see how animacy influenced RC formation. The outcomes were also compared to the distributions of RC use in corpus data. Both participant and corpus data demonstrated significant level of passivization for RCs with animate heads, strongly affirming the grammatical function assignment proposal by Bock and Warren (Cognition 21(1):47-67, 1985) as well as the premise of Production–Distribution-Comprehension account (MacDonald in Front Psychol 4:226, 2013), emphasizing the relationship between language production mechanisms and typology. However, the corpus data were observed to have higher numbers of passivization with animate condition. Accordingly, a coarse comparison of the participant RC production proportions in the current study with some other crosslinguistic research suggests that some language-specific or discourse-related interventions can also compete with the animacy accessibility during the sentence planning procedure, which needs an extra inquiry especially in Turkish language.