Dr. Oktay Çınar, one of our faculty members, presented a paper titled "Pragmatic deficits in native Turkish grammar: Null and overt subjects at the syntax-discourse interface" at the 15th Biennial High Desert Linguistic Society Conference, hosted by the Department of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico, on November 12, 2022.
In his speech, Dr. Çınar highlighted the difficulties faced by native speakers of the target language in acquiring linguistic structures at the syntax-discourse interface. He emphasized that these acquisition problems in second language acquisition are not limited to this domain alone, as even native speakers can make errors in this interface. Applying his findings to Turkish through a questionnaire administered to native Turkish speakers, Dr. Çınar discovered that in the interpretation of subjects presented in context, the perception of topic continuity and topic change in Turkish discourse can lead native speakers to make errors related to topic continuity (e.g., overuse of subjects).
Thus, Dr. Çınar concluded that limitations at the syntax-discourse interface are observed in both second language acquisition and first language acquisition. He also highlighted that the discourse features governed by Information Structure pose a general challenge for "human language."
We congratulate Dr. Çınar on his achievement and wish him continued success.
