Gradience and change at the morphosyntax-semantics interface:
Turkish number agreement and animacy hierarchy
Elif Bamyacı, Barış Kabak
Department of English Linguistics, University of Würzburg
The number system is crosslinguistically constrained by the animacy hierarchy. The `more animate a nominal is, the
more likely it is to show number (Corbett 2000). On a par with this generalization, Turkish verbs are known to
optionally take the plural verb ending in agreement with overt plural animate subjects while they are invariably
unmarked for number with overt plural inanimate subjects (e.g., Emre 1945, Sezer 1979). To this date, however, there
has been no empirical study that investigated Turkish speakers’ intuitions on the interaction between the number
inflection on the verb and the noun type of the subject as a function of the animacy hierarcy.
In this paper, we report results from an experimental study that investigated gradient judgments (e.g., Sorace & Keller
2005) concerning the acceptability of overt subject-verb number agreement during online processing by native
Turkish speakers. Since this phenomenon crucially lies at the semantics-morphosyntax interface and exhibits
optionality, we predict that it is liable to show differential levels of acceptability across generations, constituting an
indication of language change (Sorace 2003). To that end, we explored whether there are different degrees of
acceptability in plural marking across two different age groups.
We used four noun types (partly following Özsoy 2009) based on their animacy level: Human, Animal, Intermediate
and Inanimate. Each was sub-divided into two categories (Human: profession e.g., öğretmen ‘teacher’ and kinship
e.g., anne ‘mother’, Animal: big e.g., deve ‘camel’ and small e.g. kus ‘bird’, Intermediate: inherent e.g., el ‘hand’ and
teleological e.g., uçak ‘plane’, Inanimate: appliance, e.g., sandalye ‘chair’ and clothes e.g., gömlek ‘shirt’) and created
192 simple sentences of the type Subject-Predicate, each with a singular or plural subject agreeing or disagreeing with
the verb in number (e.g., kus-(lar) öt-üyor-(lar)[bird-(pl) sing-prog-(pl)]). In order to avoid bias for an animate
reading, the predicates were chosen among unergative (VERB-er, e.g., çalıs- ‘to work’ ) and unaccusative (VERBed,
e.g., üsü- ‘to be cold’ ) verbs, equally distributed among the noun types. Using the magnitude estimation technique
(Bard et al. 1996), we asked 60 native speakers of Turkish (2 groups: ages 18-28 and 42-52; 30 participants each) to
judge the goodness of the sentences.
The results showed that there was a robust tendency for both age groups to prefer singular verbs over plural verbs for
all noun types marked for the plural, with mean z-scores always in the positive range (see Figure 1 for old, and Figure
2 for young groups). This suggests that the singular verb form is the default form irrespective of the number feature of
the subject, showing that the optionality in number agreement neither exhibits free variation nor is in favor of the
marked feature. Furthermore, the Mann-Whithey U Test yielded a significant difference between the old and young
group, which was due to the fact that the old group exhibited a higher preference for plural verbs with Human plural
subjects (p<0.05). To inspect the role of the animacy hierarchy, we ran Related-Samples Wilcoxon Signed Rank Tests
for each age group. Results of these tests are summarized in the figures below.
Figures 1 and 2: The plural and singular verb endings for different plural subjects for old and young groups
respectively
Among the old participants, the plural ending was dispreferred for Intermediate and Inanimate plural subjects (zscores are in the negative range, and no significant difference between Intermediate and Inanimate). This suggests that
Intermediate plural subjects which are expected to stand closer to Animate nouns (e.g., Folli & Harley 2008) due to (i)
the inheritence of the animacy feature from the whole they belong to in the case of inherent nouns (e.g., el ‘hand’), or
(ii) their capability of functioning as agentive subjects in the case of teleological nouns (e.g., uçak ‘airplane’) are not
differentiated from Inanimate plural subjects in Turkish, both clustering at the bottom level in the animacy hierarchy.
In contrast to both Intermediate and Inanimate plural subjects, Human and Animal plural subjects were found to be
acceptable with plural verbs by the old group. However, the difference in the degree of preference between plural and
singular verbs was significant only for Animal subjects (p<0.05) and not Human subjects. We take this to indicate
that, for the old group, the higher the subject in the animacy hierarchy is, the higher the acceptability of plural marking
on the verb, and consequently the higher the level of optionality in number agreement is.
For the young group, we observe a less salient effect of animacy hierarchy: the plural verb ending is neither strongly
preferred nor dispreferred for Human and Animal plural subjects, both of which were significantly more acceptable
than Intermediate and Inanimate plural subjects (the latter two were in the negative range). Indeed, a group
comparison revealed a significantly less preference for plural verbs with Human plural subjects in comparison to old
participants (p<0.05), showing that the animacy hierarchy constitutes a much weaker constraint on agreement for the
young group than the old group.
In the light of these data, we suggest that the different patterns that emerged from group comparisons constitute a clear
sign of an on-going change in the monolingual Turkish community, showing a lessened preference on the part of the
young generation for subject-verb number agreement as well as a diminishing effect of the animacy hierarchy on this
phenomenon. The data also enable us to extend the Interface Hypothesis, which has been primarily discussed in the
context of both early and late L2 acquisition (e.g., Sorace and Filiaci 2006), to monolingual communities in predicting
diachronic change in those areas of
morphosyntax that interact with semantics, leading to optionality.
References
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