Acquisition of complementation in Turkish
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Date
2002.
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Thesis (M.A.)-Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in Social Sciences, 2002.
Abstract
This thesis analyzes the acquisition of complement structures in Turkish, concentrating on the acquisition of object complements formed with the nominalizers -mAK, -mA, -DIK and -(y)AcAk. Both naturalistic and experimental data are analyzed. The naturalistic data consists of longitudinal data collected from four monolingual Turkish children between the ages of 1;1,19 and 3;3,3. and the cross-sectional data of 33 children between 2;0 and 4;8. Comprehension and production of each nominalizing suffix are discussed for the naturalistic data. It is observed that -mAK complements with control verbs are acquired first between the ages 2;0-3;0. There are a few examples of -mA complements only around age 3;0 in the speech of one of the subjects. -DIK complements were not observed either in children's speech and were very rare in the adults' speech directed to children.Experimental tasks were carried out with 42 children between the ages 3;0- 6;5. There were different experiments assessing children's production, comprehension and imitation of complementation. The order of acquisition observed is similar to the one in the naturalistic data. -mAK complements were the earliest followed by -DIK and -mA complements. -(y)AcAK complements appeared to be last to be acquired.Both syntactic factors such as control structures and semantics of the verb paly a determining role in the order of acquisition. Finally, acquisition of complement structures appears to involve a verb by verb learning process.