Intervention effects in simple Wh-questions in Turkish

Abstract

This study investigates the nature of intervention effects introduced by four groups of potential interveners in simple wh-questions in Turkish: negative polarity items, quantifier phrases, lexically marked focus phrases with the focus particles sadece "only", bile "even", dA "also" and phonologically marked focus phrases without any focus particles. The acceptability judgments the analysis relies on have been derived partly from my own intuitions supported by the judgments of native speakers I consulted informally. However, judgments for some of the structures were not clear, and thus, I designed and conducted acceptability judgment surveys for those structures. Thus, the analysis also relies partly on the judgments collected in these surveys. The findings have revealed that negative polarity items and lexically marked focus phrases create intervention effects in Turkish whereas quantifier phrases and phonologically marked focus phrases do not. Considering the morphological, syntactic and phonological properties of negative polarity items and focus phrases in Turkish, it is argued that interveners do not form a natural class, and focus cannot be argued to create intervention effects in Turkish, in contrast to what has been proposed for other languages in the literature (Kim 2002, Beck 2006 and Kim 2006). Furthermore, the findings in this study point to the following additional observations: (i) Turkish "why" phrases differ from other wh-phrases in that they induce a weaker intervention effect; (ii) a semantically focused phrase may not get stress when it cooccurs with another semantically focused phrase in a sentence; (iii) all wh-in-situ accounts adopted by intervention effects proposals can explain Turkish intervention data. iii