UCLA

This dissertation investigates the interaction between syntax and Information Structure to account for the word order variations in Turkish. By examining the distributional and interpretive properties of Information Structural units, it proposes that semantically vacuous scrambling does not take place in Turkish. The dissertation brings in systematically built data sets from Turkish and argues that the long-lasting disagreements in the theory are due to the oversimplified nature of syntactic hierarchies. It puts forward that Turkish has five discourse-driven functional projections encoded in the syntactic structure-- three Topic projections: Aboutness, Contrastive, Discourse-Given and two Focus projections: Contrastive, and Informational. I specifically show that: (i) the left periphery of the clause structure is for the Aboutness/Contrastive Topic and the Contrastive Focus of the sentence, and (ii) the Discourse-Given Topic and the Informational Focus are below the IP domain (cf. Rizzi, 1997). I propose that all of the Topic projections as well as the Contrastive Focus trigger movement to the specifier of the relevant head, while the Informational Focus stays in-situ. The arguments supporting these claims result from a careful investigation of the interaction between scope-bearing elements and the Information Structure notions in Turkish.