Article published In:
Linguistic Variation: Online-First Articles

The emergence of clausal nominalizations in Laz

ORCID logo | Boğaziçi University
 | Boğaziçi University
This paper presents a survey of complementation strategies that are employed in Pazar and Ardesheni dialects of Laz, an endangered South Caucasian language that has been in contact with Turkish for decades. Our survey reveals strong signatures of contact in that nominalization patterns not present in cognate systems but present in Turkish seem to have been transferred into Laz. An intriguing asymmetry concerning the two dialects is that the Turkish noninalization pattern seems to have been directly copied into Pazar Laz whereas Ardesheni Laz seems to have developed a novel complementation pattern that mixes finite complementation with nominalization. Furthermore, in both dialects, complement clauses that denote propositions remain untouched by the dominant nominalization strategy in Turkish, raising questions on grammatical asymmetries in susceptibility to contact effects.
Keywords: nominalization, contact, complementation, Laz, Turkish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background on Turkish and Laz
    • 2.1Turkish
    • 2.2Laz
  • 3.Propositional complements in Laz
    • 3.1Finite complementation in Laz: An overview
    • 3.2No contact effects in propositional complementation
  • 4.Control complements in Laz
    • 4.1Masdar complements in control environments
    • 4.2Are there contact effects in control complements?
  • 5.Situation complements
    • 5.1Pazar dialect of Laz
    • 5.2Ardesheni dialect of Laz
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lv.22045.dem
References (36)
References
Avcı-Bucaklişi, Ismail, Özge Bakay, and Belma Haznedar. 2018. Yaşayan Lazca Projesi: Doğu Karadeniz ve Batı Karadeniz’de Lazcanın Durumu. 32. Ulusal Dilbilim Kurultayı, 3–4 May 2018, 91 Eyluül University, İzmir.Google Scholar
Aygen, Guülşat. 2002a. Finiteness, Case and Clausal Architecture. Doctoral Dissertation, Harvard University.
Aygen, Gülşat. 2002b. Subject case in Turkic subordinate clauses: Kazakh, Turkish and Tuvan. In Proceedings of NELS 32, ed. Masako Hirotani, 563–580. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, GLSA.Google Scholar
Boeder, Winfried. 2005. The South Caucasian languages. Lingua 1151:5–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Borsley, Robert D., and Jaklin Kornfilt. 1999. Mixed Extended Projections. In The Nature and Function of Syntactic Categories, ed. Robert Borsley. Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Demirok, Ömer. 2019. A Semantic Characterization of Turkish Nominalizations. In Proceedings of the 36th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, ed. Richard Stockwell, Maura O’Leary, Zhongshi Xu, and Z. L. Zhou, 132–142. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.Google Scholar
. 2019. Scope Theory Revisited: Lessons from pied-piping in wh-questions. Doctoral Dissertation, MIT.
Emgin, Betül. 2009. Finiteness and complementation patterns in Pazar Laz. MA thesis, Boğaziçi University.
Eren, Ömer. 2022. Preference for Transparency and Locality in Heritage Laz. Theoretical Linguistics and Languages of the Caucasus, İstanbul Bilgi University, 18th June 2022.Google Scholar
Erguvanlı-Taylan, Eser. 1998. What determines the choice of nominalizer in Turkish nominalized complement clauses? In Proceedings of the XVIth International Congress of Linguists, ed. Bernard Caron. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar
Göksel, Aslı, and Celia Kerslake. 2005. Turkish. A comprehensive grammar. London & New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Griffiths, James, and Güliz Güneş. 2015. Ki issues in Turkish. In Parenthesis and Ellipsis, ed. Marlies Kluck, Dennis Ott, and Mark de Vries, 173–218. De Gruyter Mouton. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Göksu, Duygu. 2018. Subject infinitives in turkish. Istanbul: Boğaziçi University MA thesis.
Göksu, Duygu, and Balkız Öztuürk Başaran. 2021. A complexity hierarchy-based solution to the clausal subject puzzle in turkish. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America 61:1039–1049. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Harris, Alice. 1981. Georgian Syntax. A study in relational grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
. 1991. Laz. In The Indigenous Languages of the Caucasus: Kartvelian Languages, 397–473. Caravan Books: Delmar, New York.Google Scholar
Haznedar, Belma. 2018. Türkiye’de Lazcanın Mevcut Durumu-2018. Laz Enstitüsü. URL [URL]
Johnson, Kyle. 1997. A review of The antisymmetry of syntax . Lingua 1021:21–53. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kornfilt, Jaklin. 1997. Turkish. Descriptive Grammars. Routledge.Google Scholar
. 2001. Functional projections and their subjects in Turkish clauses. In The Verb in Turkish, ed. Eser Erguvanlı-Taylan, 183–212. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2003. Subject case in turkish nominalized clauses. In Syntactic structures and morphological information, ed. U. Junghanns and L. Szucsich. Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kornfilt, Jaklin, and John Whitman. 2011. Afterword: Nominalizations in syntactic theory. Lingua 1211:1297–1313. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kutscher, Silvia. 2008. The Language of the Laz in Turkey: Contact-induced change or gradual language loss? Turkic Languages 121:82–102.Google Scholar
Lucas, Christopher. 2012. Contact-induced grammatical change: Towards an explicit account. Diachronica 291:275–300. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montrul, Silvina. 2016. The acquisition of heritage languages. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Öztürk, Balkız, and Markus Pöchtrager. 2011. Pazar Laz. LINCOM.Google Scholar
Polinsky, Maria. 2015. Incomplete Acquisition: American Russian. Journal of Slavic Linguistics 141:191–262.Google Scholar
Polinsky, Maria, and Olga Kagan. 2007. Heritage languages: In the ‘wild’ and in the classroom. Language and Linguistics Compass 11:368–395. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Putnam, Michael T., and Liliana Sánchez. 2013. What’s so incomplete about incomplete acquisition?: A prolegomenon to modeling heritage language grammars. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 31:478–508. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Scontras, Gregory, Zuzanna Fuchs, and Maria Polinsky. 2015. Heritage language and linguistic theory. Frontiers in psychology 61:1545. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vamling, Karina. 1989. Complementation in Georgian. Lund: Lund University Press.Google Scholar
Vamling, Karina, and Revaz Tchantouria. 1991. Complement Clauses in Megrelian. Studia Linguistica 451.Google Scholar
. 2018. Complementation in the Kartvelian Languages. In Complementation in the Northwest and South Caucasian Languages, ed. Karina Vamling. Malmö University. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wurmbrand, Susanne. 2001. Infinitives: Restructuring and Clause Structure. De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Wurmbrand, Susi, and Magdalena Lohninger. 2019. An implicational universal in complementation: Theoretical insights and empirical progress. In Propositional arguments in cross-linguistic research: Theoretical and empirical issues, ed. Jutta Hartmann and Angelika Wollstein. Mouton de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Yıldırım-Gündoğdu, Hilal. 2017. The structure of diye clauses in turkish. MA Thesis, Boğaziçi University.