Chapter 6
Connectivity of wh in bilingual Turkish
Developing a corpus-pragmatic filtering method
This study tests a hypothesis regarding the connectivity of wh-constructions in spoken discourse data of Turkish-German bilingual children (the ENDFAS/SKOBI corpus), focusing on constructions involving one verbum dicendi: söyle‑ ‘say, tell, verbalise, utter’. It develops a corpus-pragmatic filtering method, based on typological parameters such as headedness and wh-fronting as well as spoken language phenomena related to syntactic and prosodic integration. These criteria are applied in a stepwise manner to identify a subset of findings with potential for grammatical innovation.
Keywords: wh, connectivity, interrogativity, Turkish, German, bilingualism, language contact, verbum dicendi, discourse, clause combining, spoken language
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.
Wh and connectivity
- 3.
Wh-constructions in our data
- 4.
Wh-constructions related to verba dicendi and sentiendi
- 4.1Overall picture
- 4.2Two verba dicendi
:
De‑ ‘say’ and söyle‑ ‘say, tell, verbalise, utter’
- 4.3Distribution of de‑ ‘say’ and söyle‑ ‘say, tell, verbalise, utter’ in our data
- 4.4Direct speech phenomena with söyle‑ ‘say, tell, verbalise, utter’ in the bilingual sample
- 5.Juxtaposed finite wh-constructions in circumscribing function
- 5.1Deixis
- 5.2Utterance boundaries
- 5.3Breaks
- 5.4Preposed versus postposed wh‑construction
- 5.5In-situ versus fronted wh‑element
- 5.6Distribution of formal criteria across groups
- 6.A closer look at the remaining candidates
- 7.Preliminary results and desiderata
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Notes
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Abbreviations
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References