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Studies in Turkish as a Heritage Language
Edited by Fatih Bayram
[Studies in Bilingualism 60] 2020
► pp. 87–104

Chapter 5
Convergence in the encoding of motion events in heritage Turkish in Germany

An acceptability study

| University of Oldenburg
| University of Potsdam
| University of Cologne

The encoding of motion is a particularly interesting domain of German-Turkish language contact. German is a “satellite-framed language” that easily combines manner-of-motion verbs with path expressions outside of the verb stem. Turkish, on the other hand, is considered a “verb-framed language”, where the combination of semantically heavy manner-of-motion verbs with path expressions does not occur. In a sentence acceptability study with monolingual Turkish and bilingual German-Turkish students, we tested the acceptability of Turkish sentences which violate the canonical Turkish structure to different degrees. Bilingual Turkish-German speakers more readily accepted combinations of semantically heavy manner-of-motion verbs and path expressions than the monolingual Turkish speakers. The difference did not show in combinations of semantically light manner-of-motion verbs and Path devices. We conclude that we cannot speak of ad-hoc transfer or a general “insecurity” in the Turkish of Turkish-German bilinguals. Rather, the results show evidence for the development of new grammatical patterns in heritage Turkish in Germany, influenced by the characteristic encoding patterns of German.

Keywords: motion events, satellite-framed languages, verb-framed languages, language contact, Turkish, German, Turkish-German bilinguals, acceptability study, linear mixed effects analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Motion events in Turkish and German
  • 3.German-Turkish language contact
  • 4.Turkish and Turkish-German speakers’ reactions on satellite-framed patterns in motion sentences
    • 4.1Aims and methods
    • 4.2Subjects
    • 4.3Material
    • 4.4Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/sibil.60.05gos
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