Semantics of Turkish free conditionals
| dc.contributor | Graduate Program in Linguistics. | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Guerzoni, Elena. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Akpınar, Kadernur. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-03-16T11:43:49Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-03-16T11:43:49Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021. | |
| dc.description.abstract | The aim of the present research is to provide a novel compositional semantic analysis for Turkish conditional sentences with wh-phrases in their antecedents (wh conditionals henceforth), which are ambiguous between question and free conditional readings, the latter being the term I use for what roughly corresponds to English sentences with wh-ever phrases. Demirok (2017) is the only existing analysis of free conditionals in Turkish, which builds on Rawlins (2013). I show that Demirok’s and Rawlins’s view, which assumes Hamblin’s (1973) semantics of wh phrases, overgenerates, thus I suggest an alternative to it which assumes Rullman and Beck’s (1998) semantics of wh-phrases as restricted variables, instead. I argue that a wh-phrase can be bound by a universal modal operator, and this results in a free conditional reading, whereas, when it is bound by a question operator (as in Rullman and Beck, 1998), the question reading arises. Lastly, I turn to free conditionals involving an existential modal, and observe that one needs to stipulate the presence of a covert universal modal in them, in order to account for their truth conditions. The proposal in this dissertation contributes a new perspective on wh-conditionals in Turkish and possibly in other languages, which exhibit similar structures. | |
| dc.format.extent | 30 cm. | |
| dc.format.pages | xii, 91 leaves ; | |
| dc.identifier.other | LING 2021 A57 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://digitalarchive.library.bogazici.edu.tr/handle/123456789/15890 | |
| dc.publisher | Thesis (M.A.) - Bogazici University. Institute for Graduate Studies in the Social Sciences, 2021. | |
| dc.subject.lcsh | Turkish language -- Semantics. | |
| dc.title | Semantics of Turkish free conditionals |
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