On March 1st 2025, the 10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic (Tu+ 10) was held at University of Southern California. Our current student Bergül Soykan (3rd year student) presented a poster entitled “The Underlying Structure of Correlatives and Unconditionals in Turkish”. You can read the abstract here, and a shorter version is provided below:
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” da 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.
Several of our alimuni also attended the conference (you can read the abstracts by clicking on the titles):
- Utku Türk & Aaron Hirsch (PhD 2017)[University of Maryland, College Park]: Turkish allows covert scrambling
- Züheyra Tokaç & Jennifer Cole (PhD 1987)[Northwestern University]: Vowel cooccurrence as a predictor of perceived vowel similarity in Turkish
- Nazmiye Öyük & Ömer Demirok (PhD 2019)[Boğaziçi University]: Turkish Possessive Constructions by Upward Agree