The acquisition of discourse-pragmatic rules for null and overt first-person subjects by Greek learners of Turkish

Abstract

In Turkish, null and overt arguments do not show the same distributional properties at discourse level. There are discourse-pragmatic factors affecting this distribution (Kerslake, 1987; Ruhi, 1996; Turan, 1995; Çeltek & Oktar, 2014; Çeltek Kaili, 2017). Previous studies suggest that the acquisition of argument realization system in second language (L2) poses a major acquisition problem for adult L2 learners, especially the properties that constrain the native use of null and overt subjects at the syntax-discourse interface are reported to cause persistent difficulty. Based on this assumption, this study investigates this problematic area in L2 acquisition from a discourse-pragmatic view. More specifically, the purpose of the present study is to inspect the acquisition of the following discourse-pragmatic rules governing the use of null and overt first-person subjects in L2 Turkish oral narratives produced by first language Greek speakers: a) salient referent, b) switch focus, c) contrastive focus, d) pragmatic weight, e) epistemic parenthetical. The data were collected via three oral narrative tasks. The participants were 10 advanced L2 Turkish learners and 10 native Turkish speakers. Results obtained from the three oral narrative tasks demonstrate that advanced L2 learners of Turkish present practically no deficiency on the use of discourse-pragmatic rules that govern the use of null and overt first-person subjects.