Continuity of Reference and Subject Personal Pronoun Variation in the Turkish Spoken in Turkey and in New York City

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of continuity of reference on the use of subject personal pronouns (SPP) in the Turkish spoken in Turkey and in New York City (NYC) from a variationist perspective. Whereas the variable use of SPPs in Turkish has been extensively analyzed in many studies conducted in Europe, it has received much less attention in the US. One of the aims of the present study is to replicate the study conducted by Otheguy et al., where the influence of different social and linguistic variables on the expression of Spanish SPPs was examined across Latin American and Caribbean immigrant generations in NYC. The present study is part of a dissertation that examined several linguistic and social variables that condition the presence and absence of SPPs in the speech of 20 adult speakers living in Turkey and 20 living in NYC, but reports here only the results regarding the rates of use of overt SPPs in Turkish and the effects of continuity of reference on the use of SPPs. In both the TT and TNY samples, there were an equal number of males and females. The speakers ranged in age from 20 to 80 years old. The results of the study indicate that there was an increase in the use of overt SPPs in both the same- and different-reference environments among the TNY and a significantly higher rate of overt SPP use for TNY than for TT. These findings are consistent with those obtained in the work by Otheguy et al.