The Repair Based Investigation of Agreement in Turkish

Abstract: According to the Feature Hierarchy Hypothesis, there is a person number gender hierarchy among the agreement features. The aim of this study is to investigate whether there is a hierarchical relation between person and number features in Turkish with respect to repair process. In line with this purpose, the sentences including person, number and person-number mismatches were given to 70 participants and then they were asked to correct these sentences. The findings of the study reported in this paper revealed that the participants tend to repair the person mismatch sentences using the subject as base, while they tend to repair the number and the person-number mismatch sentences using the inflection or the subject as base. When the person, number and person-number mismatch conditions are compared pairwise, the results support Feature Hierarchy Hypothesis. In other words, the person number hierarchy is acceptable in Turkish. The other finding in this study is that specifier-head relationship plays an important role in agreement relationships than the linear order. It has been observed that the word order (subject-verb or verb-subject) does not have an effect on the repairing process. In the both cases, namely in subject-verb or verb-subject sentences, the participants tend to repair the person mismatch sentences using the subject as base.