Overt versus null subject pronoun variation in the Turkish spoken in Turkey and in New York City
Item
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Title
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Overt versus null subject pronoun variation in the Turkish spoken in Turkey and in New York City
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:1d23357dba71:11000
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identifier
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10484
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Creator
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Koban, Didem,
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Contributor
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Ricardo Otheguy
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Sociolinguistics | language contact and change | subject pronouns
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Abstract
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The purpose of this dissertation is to examine the use of subject personal pronouns in the Turkish spoken in Turkey and in New York City from a variationist perspective. Whereas the variable use of subject personal pronouns in Turkish has been extensively analyzed in many studies conducted in Europe, it has received much less attention in the U.S. This study has as one of its aims replicating the study conducted by Otheguy, Zentella and Livert (2007) where the influence of different social and linguistic variables on the expression of Spanish subject pronouns was examined across Latin American and Caribbean immigrant generations in New York. The present study examines several linguistic and social variables that condition the presence and absence of subject personal pronouns in the speech of 20 adult speakers living in Turkey (TT) and 20 living in New York (TNY). The study compares the rate of subject pronoun use in Turkey with that of NYC and whether contact with English has an influence on the overt pronoun rate.;In both the TT and TNY samples, there were an equal number of males and females and an equal number of speakers from working and professional classes. The speakers ranged in age from 20 to 80. Data analysis involved Anovas, correlations, cross-tabulations and multivariate regression analyses of linguistic and social variables. The linguistic variables, which were also examined in Otheguy et al. (2007) and in other previous studies, are person and number of the pronoun and of the verb, continuity of reference, and TMA of the verb. Social variables that are analyzed are gender, social class, age of the informant, education, age of arrival in NYC, length of residence in NYC and so forth.;The results of the study indicate that TT and TNY resemble each other regarding the linguistic variables that condition the distribution of subject personal pronouns and regarding the order of the variables that account for the most variance in the use of the pronouns. However, the two samples differ from one another with respect to the order and strength of the constraints within the person and number of the verb variable. In addition, we find a significantly higher rate of overt pronoun use for TNY than for TT. These findings are consistent with those obtained in the Spanish study and provide clear support for an English contact hypothesis when the increased use of overt subject pronouns among TNY and differences in constraint hierarchies between TT and TNY are taken into consideration.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Linguistics
