This paper investigates
Turkish subordinate constructions in 201 fictional
narratives told by 102 bilingual Turkish-Swedish
children (age 4 to 7), growing up in Sweden with
Turkish as a heritage language. All narratives
were elicited with the picture sequences of the
Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives
(MAIN, Gagarina et al., 2012). We analyze the
characteristics of the Turkish relative,
complement and adverbial clauses in the children’s
narratives and in their responses to story
comprehension questions from quantitative and
qualitative points of view. The children produce a
wide variety of subordinate constructions, going
beyond what is typically reported for Turkish
heritage language acquisition elsewhere. In the
cross-sectional data sampled, there is
considerable individual variation concerning
subordination, but relatively little development
from age 4 to 7, as some of the youngest children
already master Turkish nonfinite subordination,
and older children do not necessarily use
subordination more frequently or in more adultlike
ways than younger ones. Certain types of
subordination are rare (e.g. relativization) or
even absent in the data (complementation with
object control). Other types of subordinate
constructions are very frequent and nearly always
conform to standard adult Turkish (e.g.
complementation with subject control;
adverbialization with simple converbs). However,
the precise morphological form and function of
subjunctors in causal and purposive adverbial
clauses (an aspect rarely discussed in the Turkish
acquisition literature) is not yet mastered by the
oldest children in the sample (age 7). In general,
the Turkish-Swedish data point to relatively
successful and early acquisition of nonfinite
subordination morphology, unlike what has been
reported by a number of earlier studies of
children acquiring Turkish in a bilingual and/or
heritage language context in other countries (e.g.
Boeschoten,
1990; Pfaff, 1991, 1993; Aarssen 2001; Herkenrath &
Karakoç, 2002; Rehbein & Herkenrath,
2015). Our finding that bilingual children
acquiring Turkish are able to produce much more
complex sentences than originally claimed in the
literature is suggested to be due to differences
in setting, sampling and data elicitation.
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