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Özge, D. & Evcen, E. (2020). Referential form, word order and emotional valence in Turklish pronoun resolution in physical contact events. In Zeyrek. D. & Özge, U. (eds.) (pp. 165-185). Discourse Meaning: The view from Turkish. Boston: De Gruyter Mouton

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110686654

Abstract: 

This study investigates the effect of information structure (revealed in
SOV versus OSV orders), the type of anaphoric expression (zero versus overt pronouns),
and the verb valence (positive valence versus negative valence) on the
interpretation of ambiguous pronouns in Turkish physical contact action verbs.
Turkish speaking adult participants were asked to determine the reference for a
nonsense adjectival predicate in an utterance with an action verb and two clauses
connected by a causal connector ‘because’. We found that there was a greater
subject preference when the subject was located preverbally in the focus position.
Participants linked the null pronoun to the subject in the SOV order regardless
of the verb valence. In the overt pronoun condition in the SOV order, they took
the overt pronoun as coreferential with the object in the positive valence verbs
while linking it to the subject in the negative valence verbs. We argued that the
topic shifting mission of the overt pronoun may change according to the context
such that the overt pronoun shifts the topic from the subject to the object in the
positive valence events while keeping the topic constant in the negative valence
events. There was also an increase in the subject reference in the OSV order, which
revealed that the entity salience increases with the combined effect of subjecthood
and focushood. Finally, there was a greater subject preference in the positive
valence verbs than in negative valence verbs in the OSV order, which suggests
that the information structure locating the object as the topic (i.e., given) entity
might be decreasing the causality attribution to the subject in these contexts.