Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Turkic Languages, cilt.28, sa.2, ss.225-245, 2024 (AHCI, Scopus)
This paper aims to test the referential properties of the Turkish anaphors kendisi ‘self’ and o ‘he/she/it’. The literature suggests that both kendisi and o can refer to long-distance and extrasentential antecedents (e.g. Kornfilt 2001, Göksel & Kerslake 2005). Two experiments were conducted to test the validity of this claim. In both, we tested the referential possibilities of the anaphors kendisi and o when they function as embedded objects. This study thus complements Gürel (2002, 2004), where the same anaphors were used as embedded subjects. The first experiment (an acceptability judgment task), in which participants were biased towards either a long-distance or an extrasentential antecedent via appropriately structured contexts, showed that a long-distance antecedent was favored almost equally by both kendisi and o, but neither was readily interpreted as co-referential with an extrasentential antecedent, although o was rated significantly higher than kendisi. These findings prompted us to further investigate participants’ preferences when referring to extrasentential antecedents. We speculated that the number of potential antecedents within a sentence influenced participants’ preferences. If this was the case, the higher rating of o compared to kendisi in extrasentential contexts would be expected, since the number of potential intra-sentential antecedents was higher for kendisi than for o (since kendisi can refer to both local and longdistance antecedents). Keeping the rest of the experimental design identical to the first experiment, in our second acceptability-judgment task we manipulated the number of accessible antecedents preceding kendisi/o in the experimental sentences to give prominence to the extrasentential antecedents. The analyses showed higher ratings for both anaphors when the number of potential linguistic antecedents before kendisi and o decreased. The results are discussed with reference to the theoretical assumptions and possible future directions.