An Experimental and Corpus Based Analysis of Temporal Converb Clauses in Turkish

Abstract

The studies in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics have reported that the positions of main and subordinate clauses in converb constructions are influenced by syntactic parsing, semantic and discourse-related factors (Diessel, 2005, 2008; Verstraete, 2004; Wiechmann & Kerz, 2013). One of the semantic factors is the “iconicity of sequence theory” and the related iconicity theory states that linguistic structures mostly mirror the structure of conceptual order (Croft, 2003). “The processing theory of constituent order” is about word order variations, from a syntactic parsing point of view. It states that words and phrases are arranged in such a way that linear ordering is subservient to constituent-structure recognition (Diessel, 2005). This study aims at investigating the positioning variations in temporal converb clauses in Turkish and analysing if different positions of subordinate and main clause in temporal converb clause constructions cause any significant differences in processing. There are several converbial suffixes which produce temporal converb clauses in Turkish. In this study, the following nine converb suffixes are analysed: -(y)IncA (when), -DIğIndA (when), -DIğI zaman (when), -ken (while), -(A/I) r…-mAz (as soon as), -DIğIndAn beri (since), -mAdAn önce (before), -DIktAn sonra (after) and -DIkçA (whenever). The data of the study were collected from the Turkish National Corpus (TNC) (Aksan et al., 2012). After identifying 9000 samples of temporal converbs, these were first grouped based on the suffixes mentioned above. For the corpus study; the data were analysed using chi-square test. The 2×3 X² analysis was employed to see the correlations between conceptual order and linear structure. The findings of the corpus study show that temporal converb clauses in Turkish generally have a tendency to appear before the main clause. The clauses expressing priority and the clauses expressing simultaneity are found to precede the main clauses, which is in line with iconic clause order. The converb constructions expressing posteriority appear to precede the main clause, which is not supported by the iconicity principle. These findings suggest that the iconicity of sequence does not have a role in the placement of temporal converb clauses in Turkish. For the experimental study, two self-paced reading experiments were conducted to see whether the different positions of subordinate and main clause in temporal converb clause constructions cause any significant differences in processing. The participants for each study were fifty native speakers of Turkish. They attended the studies voluntarily and did not have any vision problems, neurological or psychological disorders and literacy difficulties. Necessary ethical approval was obtained from Human Research Ethical Committee of Hacettepe University for the studies. Both experiments included thirty-six experimental items and thirty-six filler items as well as seventy-two comprehension questions for those experimental and filler sentences. Both studies were designed to incorporate experimental items with two conditions. In the first condition, converb clauses come before the main clause and in the second condition converb clauses come after the main clause. PCIbex (Zehr & Schwarz, 2018), which offers a straightforward coding interface for implementing experimental designs and facilitates the sharing of resulting experiments through web browsers, was used in the experiments. For data analysis, the conformity of numerical variables to normal distribution was checked by “Shapiro-Wilk Test” (Shapiro & Wilk, 1965). To compute aggregate means, t-tests and Mann–Whitney U tests were performed. The findings of the experimental study show that there is a processing difficulty when temporal clauses in Turkish are in the non-default position.