Acquisition of Syntax in Turkish

Acquisition of Syntax in Turkish

EREN, Emine

Key words: acquisition, syntax, morpho-syntax, Turkish, learning ABSTRACT Syntax investigates the rules of functions of the words in sentences and how words form a meaningful sentence in an order (Galda et al., 1997: 27;), while morphology investigates organization and formation of words (Yavuz and Balcı, 2011) and the order of the morphemes. In Turkish, morphemes gain inflectional or derivational features in a word in a sentence or this one single word might be a sentence on its own. It is difficult to separate morphology from syntax in Turkish, since Turkish is inflected, agglutinative and allowing diversion via free word-order. Inflectional morphology constitutes a relationship between sentence formations (Penke, 2012). Thus the aim of this study is to investigate morpho-syntax acquisition and development of language of Turkish infants; i.e. what types of words are observed in morpho-syntax acquisition in Turkish infants and at which stage syntax acquisition can be followed. As methodology, empirical data which is longitudinal data of a child called Özge starting from the age of 1:4.26 to 2:04.14 from CHILDES, in addition to some sample data of the longitudinal study of Ekmekçi (1979) that was showed in the study of Ekmekçi and Can (2000) on Turkish language acquisition. As a result, the last phases of one-word stage is the start for syntax acquisition, an early acquisition period; and nouns and verbs both are observed for the use of morpho-syntax stage.

Article
PeerReviewed

IBU Publishing

2013-05-03

1749