THE ROLE OF SEMANTIC FEATURES IN TURKISH WORD ORDER

In terins of word order typology, Turkish is a rather rigid SOV language; that is, universale proposed by Greenberg (1963) for verb final languages hold true for Turkish. However, sentences with word Orders that differ from the canonical SOV can, readily, be observed in both the written and spoken language. Such word Orders (e.g. OSV, SVO, OVS, etc.) constitute the "marked" Orders äs opposed to the "unmarked" verb-final order. A sentence with a marked word order is not merely a stylistic variant of its unmarked order, that is, they cannot be used interchangeably in every context with the only differerice being one of style. Not only are there certain grammatical restrictions that operate on word order Variation, but there are also particular pragmatic conditions that govern the selection of the most felicitous word order in a given context. That word order Variation in the language is rule governed and serves particular functions receives support from child language acquisition, äs well. Slobin (1978) and Ekmekgi (1986) show that from the time children start using füll sentences, they make use of different word Orders in approximately the same way adults do. Thus word order Variation must have fairly transparent rules and serve particular purposes which Turkish children learn and make use of at a rather early age. The aim of this paper is to investigate one particular type of restriction on word order, namely the restriction caused by the semantic features [+definite] and [+animate] of NPs. Structures considered for NP Variation will be simple sentences.