Acquisition of complementation in Turkish

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the acquisition of complement structures in Turkish, concentrating on the acquisition of object complements formed with the nominalizers -mAK, -mA, -DIK and -(y)AcAk. Both naturalistic and experimental data are analyzed. The naturalistic data consists of longitudinal data collected from four monolingual Turkish children between the ages of 1;1,19 and 3;3,3. and the cross-sectional data of 33 children between 2;0 and 4;8. Comprehension and production of each nominalizing suffix are discussed for the naturalistic data. It is observed that -mAK complements with control verbs are acquired first between the ages 2;0-3;0. There are a few examples of -mA complements only around age 3;0 in the speech of one of the subjects. -DIK complements were not observed either in children's speech and were very rare in the adults' speech directed to children.Experimental tasks were carried out with 42 children between the ages 3;0- 6;5. There were different experiments assessing children's production, comprehension and imitation of complementation. The order of acquisition observed is similar to the one in the naturalistic data. -mAK complements were the earliest followed by -DIK and -mA complements. -(y)AcAK complements appeared to be last to be acquired.Both syntactic factors such as control structures and semantics of the verb paly a determining role in the order of acquisition. Finally, acquisition of complement structures appears to involve a verb by verb learning process.