Semantic, prosodic, and syntactic marking of Information Structural Units in Turkish

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on how Turkish encodes information structural units within semantics, prosody and syntax interface. Information packaging is investigated under the classification of (i) aboutness topic, (ii) contrastive topic, (iii) contrastive focus, (iv) discourse-new focus, and (v) discourse anaphoric constituents. Focus phrases are differentiated not based on a designated syntactic position or the feature of contrast but based on exhaustive identification with contrastive focus phrases. The prosodic properties of focus phrases in SOV order indicate that (i) when focus is in the immediately preverbal position, contrastive focus and discourse-new focus and broad focus sentences do not differ significantly with respect to duration or pitch height at any of the measurement points, (ii) focus in sentence initial, medial or final domains is always marked as the rightmost phonological phrase with intonational phrase level prominence, which marks the beginning of the nuclear fall. The syntactic investigation of the interaction of information structural units with negation and quantifier scope illustrate that all movement operations are driven by discourseinterpretational purposes. Additionally, vP does not show phasehood properties and the derivation of the data is captured via eventual, situational, and propositional domains and clause-internal functional projections. In the absence of TP, (i) CP does not show phasehood properties as evidenced by binding data, ECM clauses, bounding nodes, (ii) temporal information is encoded as a secondary effect of Mood.