Syntax of information structure in Turkish

Abstract

Three sentential positions have been ascribed a special status in the focus-background articulation of Turkish sentences. It has been argued that the sentence-initial, postverbal and immediately preverbal slots are three syntactic positions that are, respectively, allocated for topic, background and focus marking in Turkish. The analysis offered in this paper starts with a close examination of each of these positions in terms of the informational functions they are supposed to perform. It is shown that such a position-function mapping gives a noncomplete and noncorrect description of information structure in Turkish. The major claim made by this study is that Turkish does not employ any syntactic strategy to mark: the informational status of a sentence element; but some sentence elements may undergo a syntactic operation of detachment to clause-external positions to satisfy a certain informational requirement of the sentence itself.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 31 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.