Word order variations in Turkish : evidence from binding and scope
Ceyhan Temürcü · 2001
This study aims to contribute to the efforts of explaining word order variations observed in Turkish, by granting a role to the hierarchical structure for certain word order alternations, and by admitting discourse-driven ‘extra-syntactic’ mechanisms for others. It will propose a tentative extension to the framework of the Minimalist Program (as it appears in Chomsky, 1995), by adopting its basic tenets and introducing the information structure (IS) as a representation that feeds the phonological component. IS differences will be maintained to be responsible from what is frequently referred to in the literature as ‘optional’ or ‘stylistic’ movements. Extraposition and contrastive focus fronting will be argued to be IS-driven movements in Turkish. It will be maintained that the SOV-OSV alternation in the surface forms with pre-verbal focus signals a difference in the hierarchical structure, whereas other word orders in transitives can best be viewed as sharing the phrase structures, hence being discursive variants of either the SOV or the OSV construction. OSV will be analyzed as involving a grammatical movement of the object to an IP-external Spec position. In addition, OSV will be proposed to represent the inverse voice in Turkish. The phrase structure in Turkish will be analyzed from a Minimalist perspective, and structural analyses will be given for what is referred to as ‘incorporation’ of objects and subjects in Turkish. Keywords: Turkish, word order, phrase structure, information structure, phonological component, extraposition, contrastive fronting, topic-driven movement, Case checking, object shift, incorporation, VP-shells, scrambling, inverse voice, basic word order.