The semantics of the Turkish accusative marked definites and the relation between prosodic structure and information structure

This paper introduces a new semantic effect induced by the Turkish accusative and argues that accusative marked definites serving as the arguments of verbs of motion, incremental theme verbs and verbs of location yield a delimited reading. This delimited reading is further observed to arise when the accusative definite is unaccented suggesting that the semantic effects stemming from the presence of the accusative objects are intricately related to focus facts. Elaborating this view, the present study argues that an accented accusative definite triggers existential presupposition rendering a hearer-inferrable and discourse-new information status whereas an unaccented one triggers pragmatic presupposition which gives rise to a hearer-status which is old and a discourse status rendered old through evaluation of the accepted commonground between interlocutors.