Optional subject-verb agreement in heritage Turkish

In Turkish, 3^rd person plural subjects normally appear with verbs that are unmarked for number, rendering these verb forms indistinguishable from the singular form. The plural morpheme –lAr is preferentially omitted from the verb, especially in spoken discourse, so as to avoid repeating the same morpheme that also marks plurality on nouns. Plural suffix omission in Turkish is optional and is affected by grammatical, surface-level, and semantic constraints such as subject animacy and subject position. The present study investigates to what extent Turkish heritage speakers are sensitive to these constraints and whether they differ from non-heritage speakers. 48 non-heritage Turkish speakers resident in İstanbul, Türkiye, and 58 heritage Turkish speakers resident in Berlin and Potsdam, Germany, were tested by using a scalar acceptability judgement task. The experimental stimuli were created by manipulating both subject animacy and subject position to test the effect of animacy and subject-verb distance on the acceptability of overt plural marking on the verb. Besides confirming the general preference for singular verb forms, participants' judgement patterns were affected both by subject animacy and by subject position. Significant differences were observed between heritage and non-heritage speakers in their acceptance of plural-marked verbs, suggesting that the relatively subtle interplay between subject animacy and subject position on optional subject-verb agreement marking is not always fully acquired under heritage language conditions.

Keywords: Subject-verb agreement, Turkish, Heritage speakers, Subject animacy, Subject position

This research is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project Number 317633480 – SFB 1287, Project B04. I thank Çilem Çiçek for her help with participant recruitment and data col­lection.