Within the framework of the systematic functional grammar (SFG), Matthiessen (2004) has provided an analysis of the word/element order according to which word/element order in a clause is decided by experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. In this study which has been conducted aiming at the description and analysis of the…

The present study focuses on long distance scrambling and operator movement from embedded clauses to sentence initial position in Turkish. It proposes that the scrambling of the arguments out of the complement clauses is possible due to the fact that such phrases move cyclically through phases in Turkish. It is also asserted that the adjuncts that…

In Turkish, Relative Clause (RC) attachment ambiguity arises when two noun phrases (NPs) in a genitive construction follow the (RC). The present paper studies Turkish RC attachment preferences of Turkish native speakers in two experiments through off-line comprehension tasks. While in the first experiment the main verb immediately follows the NP…

The study aims at investigating the discourse marker "hasa" 'now' in Jordanian Arabic using relevance theory. The study also examined the grammaticalization of "hasa" and how it developed to be a discourse marker. The study also explored the functions of "hasa" in Jordanian Arabic. The data, which consisted of 500…

This paper investigates a number of issues regarding negative polarity items (NPIs henceforth), the scope of negation and other negative elements in Turkish. First, based on new data, I argue that the distribution of the adverbial NPI "sakin" 'ever' is not as restricted as it was claimed in previous work (cf. Kelepir 2000, 2001). That's,…

This study aims at describing the functions of passive voice and how authors reflect their stance through those functions in Turkish academic discourse. Depending on the findings of a corpus based research, this study makes a counterpoint to functionalist views on the ground that passivization does not necessarily result in promoting agents in…

Over the past two decades the concept of semantic prosody has attracted considerable research interest since Sinclair (1991) observed that "many uses of words and phrases show a tendency to occur in a certain semantic environment" (p. 112). Sinclair (2003) also noted that semantic prosody conveys its pragmatic meaning and attitudinal…