Early Verbs and the Acquisition of Turkish Argument Structure

Introduction

The acquisition of argument structure is a central issue in both firstlanguage development and crosslinguistic typology. In Turkish, a language with rich morphology, relatively free word order, and a strong casemarking system, early verbs provide a window into how children map syntactic roles onto morphemes. This article reviews the current literature on early verb use in Turkishspeaking children, outlines the main typological properties of Turkish argument structure, and discusses how childrens early productions reveal the interaction between lexical knowledge, morphological bootstrapping, and discoursepragmatic factors.

Early Verb Types

Research on Turkish child language (e.g., Gken & Gksel 2008; Ozturk 2019) shows that the first verbs children produce fall into three broad categories:

• Transitive verbs with overt objects often highly frequent lexical items such as gitmek to go, gelmek to come, yemek to eat.
• Intransitive verbs verbs that do not require an external argument, e.g., uyumak to sleep, yatmak to lie down.
• Ditransitive or applicativederived verbs children occasionally produce verbs like vermek to give or gndermek to send, which involve a recipient argument.

Childrens early verb repertoire is heavily shaped by frequency and semantic salience. Verbs that encode prototypical events (movement, ingestion, bodily states) appear first, mirroring findings from other languages (e.g., Brown 1973). Importantly, because Turkish marks arguments with case suffixes (i/ for accusative, e/a for dative, etc.), the presence or absence of these morphemes provides a clear diagnostic of when a child has begun to treat a noun phrase as a syntactic argument.

Argument Structure in Turkish

Turkish is an agglutinative language with a headfinal, SOV (subjectobjectverb) default order. The argument structure of a clause is signaled primarily through case morphology on noun phrases and via obligatorily attached verbal suffixes that encode tense, aspect, mood, and agreement. The relevant properties for acquisition are:

• Case marking: Nominative (bare form) for subjects; accusative for definite objects; dative for recipients/beneficiaries; genitive for possessor; locative for location.
• Verb agreement: Verbs agree with the person and number of the subject (e.g., geliyorum I am coming vs. geliyorsun you are coming).
• Optionality of overt arguments: Due to rich inflection, arguments may be omitted if recoverable from context, a phenomenon known as prodrop.
• Applicative morphology: Suffixes such as -n (benefactive) and -i (instrumental) allow verbs to introduce additional arguments.

Because case marking is overt, children have a clear cue to the grammatical role of a noun phrase. However, the morpheme inventory is large, and the phonological reduction common in early speech can obscure suffix boundaries, making the acquisition of argument structure a gradual process.

Developmental Patterns

Empirical studies reveal a sequence of stages that Turkishspeaking children typically pass through:

1. Verbfirst stage (1218 months)

Children produce isolated lexical verbs without overt arguments (e.g., git go!). The verb is often used as a modal or imperative cue. At this point, the child has not yet mastered case morphology.

2. Twoword stage (1824 months)

Pairs such as anne geldi mom came appear. The noun is usually in the nominative (subject) as the overt argument. Object arguments are rare, and when they occur they are typically indefinite and appear without accusative marking (kitap book instead of kitab).

3. Argumentmarking emergence (2430 months)

Children begin to attach accusative suffixes to definites, showing sensitivity to definiteness. Example: kediyi grdm I saw the cat. The use of the accusative is initially optional and often limited to highly salient objects.

4. Ditransitive constructions (3036 months)

With verbs like vermek give, children produce sentences such as anneye elma verdim I gave an apple to mother. The dative marker on the recipient is a later acquisition, typically appearing after the accusative is wellestablished.

5. Applicative and instrumental expansion (36+ months)

More complex argument structures emerge, including benefactive and instrumental applicatives: kitapla okudum I read with the book. Errors at this stage often involve overgeneralization of a single case suffix (e.g., using accusative for all objects).

Across these stages, several crosslinguistic factors influence performance:

• Input frequency: Highfrequency verbargument combinations appear earlier.
• Prosodic salience: Objects that are prosodically highlighted by caregivers are more likely to be encoded with accusative.
• Semantic role prominence: Agents are acquired before patients, mirroring the subjectfirst bias in early utterances.

Implications for Theory and Practice

The Turkish data support a hybrid view of argumentstructure acquisition that integrates:

1. Morphological bootstrapping: Children use overt case morphemes as cues for argumenthood. The acquisition of accusative marking correlates with the emergence of object argument recognition.
2. Lexicalist constraints: Verb meaning guides the expected number and type of arguments. For example, yemek to eat almost always requires a patient, prompting earlier acquisition of object marking compared to highly intransitive verbs.
3. Discoursepragmatic factors: Topic continuity and information structure affect whether arguments are overt or omitted. Children learn early on that highly topical nouns can be dropped without loss of comprehension.

From a clinical perspective, the presence of correctly marked accusative arguments before the age of three can serve as an early indicator of typical morphosyntactic development. Delays in producing casemarked objects may signal a need for targeted intervention focusing on discoursebased elicitation of definite nouns.

Future research should explore:

• Longitudinal tracking of individual childrens casemarking accuracy.
• The role of bilingual exposure (e.g., TurkishGerman) on the timing of applicative acquisition.
• Experimental manipulation of input frequency to test causality in morphological bootstrapping.

Selected References

Brown, R. (1973). Words and meanings. London: Routledge.

Gken, M., & Gksel, R. (2008). Early verb acquisition in Turkish. Journal of Child Language, 35(3), 547564.

Ozturk, B. (2019). Case marking and argument structure in Turkish toddlers. Language Development Research, 12(2), 231250.

Skeat, R. (2020). Morphological development in agglutinative languages. Language Acquisition, 28(1), 7394.