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The Acquisition of Turkish in Childhood
Edited by Belma Haznedar and F. Nihan Ketrez
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 20] 2016
► pp. 79–98

Acquisition of canonical and non-canonical word orders in L1 Turkish

| Middle East Technical University, Turkey

While some studies on child language acquisition demonstrate that the properties of syntax are acquired before syntax-pragmatics interface and the children experience difficulties in several aspects of pragmatic language use, some others, report early sensitivity to the syntax-pragmatics interface. This study aims to explore whether the syntax-before-pragmatics argument can account for acquisition of Turkish word order by examining the syntactic and pragmatic word order preferences of Turkish children. The data obtained from 12 Turkish monolingual children aged between 2;0–6;0 reveal that at 2;0, Turkish children show sensitivity to the syntax-pragmatics interface and use various word orders in line with their pragmatic intentions and the pragmatic constraints of their language increase with the age.

Keywords: syntax-before-pragmatics argument, word order, syntax-pragmatics interface, L1 Turkish
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Syntactic and pragmatic development in the acquisition of L1 word order
  • 3.Acquisition of Turkish word order
  • 4.Word order in Turkish
  • 5.Pragmatic considerations in Turkish
  • 6.The study
  • 7.Results and discussion
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 18 November 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.20.04sag
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