A research article by Linguistics PhD candidate Tamarae Hildebrandt is included in the book Tu+ 1: Proceedings of the first workshop on Turkish, Turkic and the languages of Turkey, published recently by GLSA (Graduate Linguistics Student Association), Department of Linguistics, University of Massachusetts.

The articles in the proceedings volume represent a selection of papers presented at Tu+1, the first workshop on Turkish, Turkic and the languages of Turkey, which was held at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in November 2015, in collaboration with Yale University.

The title of Hildebrandt’s article is “Turkish Scrambling within Single Clause wh-questions,” and is based on a poster that she presented at the Tu+1 workshop.

 

ABSTRACT:

Turkish is an Altaic language that exhibits a special kind of movement called scrambling, which allows for constituents to move out of their base-generated position. Ross (1967) first thought scrambling was located in the stylistic component. The stylistic component optionally applied in the grammar to account for word order differences. Since then, there are two different types of scrambling: A- and A’-scrambling (Öztürk 2005). A-scrambling, changes the meaning of the intended question, while A’-scrambling preserves the intended meaning. Although Turkish is a wh-in-situ language (Cheng 1997), scrambling can occur in wh-questions. In fact, some wh-questions require the scrambling of a constituent. In this paper, I propose two additional phrases (wh-phrase and focus phrase) in the CP layer, (following Rizzi 2002) to account for the two different types of scrambling in Turkish. The analysis also extends well to multiple instances of scrambling in interrogatives and multiple wh-phrase constructions.