Abstract
Abstract In this chapter, I investigate the interaction between centering theory and word order in a ‘free’ word order language, i.e., Turkish. In “free’ word order languages, e.g., Czech. Finnish. German, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese, Korean, Polish. Russian, Turkish, Urdu, the word order serves to structure the information being conveyed to the hearer by indicating what is the topic and the focus of the sentence. These discourse-related notions, which will be defined more thoroughly in the next sections, form the information structure of the sentence. I will argue that centering and information struc ture have different roles in discourse processing. The information structure of a sentence instructs the hearer on how to update his/her discourse model with the information in the sentence, while centering serves to link the sentence to the prior context.
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