|
participle expresses non-future (i.e., present and/or past) events. Subject
participles, by contrast, do not require agreement marking and they do not
make time reference. Both the object and subject participles require derived
word order whereas other non-finite forms (infinitives or gerunds) do not.
77
Another reason why fewer object participles are produced in the
agrammatic speech may be the complexity of the construction in which they
appear. Kornfilt (1997) argues, for instance, that the Object Relatives have
rather complex syntactic representations: the Object Relatives require
subject agreement whereby the subject is assigned genitive case. The
Subject Relatives, by contrast, do not require subject agreement and
genitive case assignment. According to Yarbay-Duman, Altinok, Özgirgin
and Bastiaanse’s (2011) Integration Problem Hypothesis, integrating
information provided by derived word order and non-base case adds to the
problems of agrammatic speakers. On the basis of the current data it is
impossible to decide whether the lack of object participles is due to a
problem with inflection or because these participles are associated with
object relativization. It is worthwhile to develop an experiment to find out
what underlies the spare use of participles in Turkish narrative speech.
3.4.4.
Evidentials
The final research question was whether the use of direct and indirect
evidentials is affected in Turkish agrammatic speech. Evidentiality is
obligatorily marked on finite verbs that refer to the past. In earlier
experimental studies, it was shown that Turkish agrammatic speakers have
problems using verbs referring to the past (Yarbay-Duman and Bastiaanse,
2009; Bastiaanse et al., 2011) and that, within this category, direct
evidentials are most impaired (Arslan et al., 2014). At the first sight, this is
not reflected in the narrative speech data. The agrammatic speakers do not
have more problems to refer to the past than to the present in their narrative
speech and the frequency of marking for evidentiality is normal. This is
comparable to the findings of Anjarningsih and Bastiaanse (2011): the SI-
speaking agrammatic speakers used relatively fewer aspectual adverbs, but
the distribution of reference to past, present and future was the same for the
agrammatic and NBD speakers.
Although the frequency of morphemes referring to the past is normal
for both direct and indirect evidentials, a post-hoc analysis revealed that
78
there is a trade-off pattern. Such a trade off pattern was observed earlier
between time reference markers in Dutch and SI and diversity of the
produced verbs. This is also visible in Turkish, but only for direct
evidentials. Direct evidentials refer to an event in the past that is witnessed
by the speaker. It was shown by Arslan et al. (2014) that these verb forms
are more difficult for agrammatic speakers than indirect evidentials (that
refer to an event that was heard of or inferred) and than verbs with present
and future tense (Bastiaanse et al., 2011; Yarbay Duman and Bastiaanse,
2009). Recall that the direct evidential is used in personal narratives while
the indirect evidential is the typical form for story-telling. The trade-off
pattern cannot be attributed to the use of evidentials as narrative markers, as
both groups have an equal number of instances of both personal narration
and story-telling which were analysed. Alternatively, Bastiaanse (2013)
suggests that what makes finite verbs in narrative speech difficult for
agrammatic speakers is the fact that the name of the event should be
retrieved and inflected for the time frame in which the event takes place.
This requires a high processing load. The current data suggest that this is
most difficult for verb forms that need to be linked to events that one
witnessed.
Although the number of evidential verb forms is similar in
agrammatic speakers and NBDs, in analogy to the findings in Swahili
(Abuom and Bastiaanse, 2012), the agrammatic group provides less
information with these verbs. However, there are important individual
differences here: those agrammatic speakers who produce relatively many
direct evidential markers, do not provide much information with them (as
shown by the relatively low diversity); whereas those agrammatic speakers
who provide relatively much information with direct evidentials (high
diversity) use them relatively less frequently. These problems with
grammatical morphemes that relate the event to the time frame in which it
happened have been observed before for verb inflections in Dutch and
aspectual adverbs in SI. In SI, such a pattern was observed for all time
frames (for Dutch no analysis per time frame was done). In Turkish, this
only holds for direct evidentials. This trade-off was not observed in Swahili,
but in this language, reference to the past in narrative speech was impaired.
What seems to be the common denominator here is that the verb forms for
which discourse linking is required are difficult: direct evidentials in
79
Turkish, past tense in Swahili and all aspectual adverbs in SI require
discourse linking, as suggested by Zagona (2003). This morphological
information needs to be parsed by discourse syntax, which is hard for
agrammatic speakers (Avrutin, 2000; 2006; Bastiaanse et al., 2011; Bos and
Bastiaanse, 2013).
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
