Structure of Turkish Discourse

This project focuses on characterizing Turkish discourse structure and processes. As is well known, language is not a haphazard construct but rather a structured system at both sentence and beyond sentence-levels. The patterns and mechanisms that constitute this structured system are not transparent and they have to be investigated to uncover how the language system works. Discourse structure can partly be characterized by discourse mechanisms such as nominal and temporal anaphoric reference, deictic reference, nominal and verbal ellipsis, discourse markers, also known as cue phrases. The motivation for the project is twofold: Firstly, these mechanisms will reveal how discourse is structured in Turkish, and secondly, this will have implications for some computational, psychological, and pedagogical research.

The project is supported by AFP.
METU AFP Project: AFP-99-06-04-03