Our alum Heejong Ko (PhD 2005) gave the opening remarks at the 1st SNU Linguistics Symposium on January 10 and 11, 2025.
Third-year student Bergül Soykan gave a talk entitled “The Underlying Structure of Correlatives and Unconditionals in Turkish”. A brief abstract is given below and you can read the longer version here.
This study investigates the structure of correlatives and unconditionals in Turkish, focusing on their syntactic and semantic parallels and distinctions. I propose that correlatives align with standard if-conditionals, while unconditionals resemble antecedent-external “even if” conditionals in Turkish, particularly through the interaction with the particle da. The study addresses the key question: why do non-past markers (-Ir, -Iyor, -Acak) block unconditional interpretations? Drawing on previous analyses and new evidence, it proposes that this restriction arises from the presuppositional conflict introduced by da and the non-past markers. These findings shed light on Turkish morphosyntax and its implications for cross-linguistic patterns, leaving open questions about the broader interaction of tense and modality in conditional structures.
