The Development Profiles of Subject NP and Zero Anaphora Use in Turkish in Students who are Learning Turkish as a Foreign Language

Abstract

This study investigates the development of zero subject anaphora vs. subject pronoun/full NP use in the learning of Turkish as a foreign language. Drawing on the discourse restrictions in the use of zero anaphora in Turkish, written compositions of learners’ from different proficiency levels were analyzed in terms of whether learners use (i) zero anaphora in accordance with topic continuity and (ii) pronoun/full NP in accordance with topic change. Findings show that from the elementary level learners, in discourse production, are successful at deleting the subject NP to maintain topic continuity, but are less successful at using pronoun/full NP when they need to change topic.

Keywords

• Turkish
• Interlanguage
• Subject NP deletion
• Second Language acquisition of Turkish
• Learning Turkish as a foreign Language