Situation Types and Implications of Teaching Single Verb Versus Multiple Verb Constructions of Tatar to Turkish speaking Students in Higher Education

Situation Types and Implications of Teaching Single Verb Versus Multiple Verb Constructions of Tatar to Turkish speaking Students in Higher Education

Güney, Fatma Şahan

The significance of verb semantics and aspectual distinctions of verbs within a specific language is obvious and relevant, as much to language acquisition (Andersen and Shirai 1996; Aksu-Koc 1978 and 1998; Gôkmen 2003 and 2004; Gôkmen and Lee 2002; Olsen 1999), as to second language acquisition (Bardovi-Harlig 1994a, 1994b, 1998 and 2000; Collins 2002; Salaberry & Shirai 2002; Slabakova 2002). Aspect, as opposed to time /tense is considered to be non-deictic (Comrie 1979: 1-3) and to involve three types of information, namely the lexical meaning of a verb, its argument and inflectional structure (Smith 1983, 1986 and 1997). Specifically, the situaiton types within aspect are important in foreign language teaching since, besides aspectual type of a single verb, the ways in expressing aspect, and in particular the situaiton types, also exhibit differences from one language to another. In Tatar, for instance, the situation types, besides other aspectual information, involve double or multiple verb constructions, which either identify or modify the aspectual type of a sentence. Both Tatar and Turkish are agglutinative languages having SOV word order, and belong to Turkic linguistic family. As opposed to Turkish which is mostly a language of single verb predicates, Tatar, though closely related to Turkish, heavily rely upon double or multiple verb constructions in order to make aspectual distincitions within clauses and distinctions of situation types in verb meaning. During the instruction of Tatar courses for more than 8 yeras, based on student homeworks, term papers and exam papers, I have observed that double verb constructions with aspectual post verbs is one point in learning Tatar grammar which students make most of their mistakes. In this paper, I am going to investigate if there are any meaningful differences between the levels of learning single verb constructions on one hand and double or multiple verb ones with aspectual post verbs on the other. In this regard, the preliminary findings point out to the fact that the learning of double/multiple verb constructions with aspectual post verbs by Turkish speaking students, who do not have paralel constructions in their native language, are less successfull in comparison to the learning of single verb perdicates.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2011-05

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