This paper investigates phenomena of postpredicativity in a Turkish- Kurmanji Kurdish-German trilingual corpus of spoken language. Starting from the assumption that postpredicativity when viewed in this trilingual perspective is an epiphenomenal effect of argument type in Kurmanji, finite verb movement in German and discourse activation status (next to illocutionarily motivated verb fronting) in Turkish, it sets out to explore overlaps and double motivations. Based on a collection of 1,211 findings, differentiations within the categories as well as overlaps at several levels are identified. Central results are discourse-level motivations in Kurmanji, their dependence on syntactic size, and overlaps between illocutional verb fronting and discourse activation status in Turkish.
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WOWA — Word Order in Western Asia
The focus on Western Asia is motivated by an overarching research interest in the areal diffusion of word order regularities; specifically, we investigate the respective impact of inheritance (the genetic affiliation of the languages concerned, e.g. Turkic, Semitic, etc.) and the impact of neighbouring languages, related or not, in shaping word order in usage. In addition, we address the issue of which aspects of word order are stable within a particular doculect, and which display corpus-internal variability.
More generally, this is connected to the issue of integrating variation into typology. Finally, WOWA is the only cross-linguistic data-base of its type that includes exclusively spoken language, and thus provides an important corrective to much ongoing work in corpus-based typology, which is still largely based on written language.