Superiority effects with wh-adjuncts in Turkish

Abstract

This paper examines Superiority constraints in Turkish, a wh-in-situ language that permits both A- and A'-scrambling. Previous accounts argue that Turkish lacks Superiority constraints when multiple wh-phrases occur within the same clause; that is, both wh-phrases can freely move to the left periphery, and the lower syntactic wh-phrase can take scope over the higher one at LF. Previous accounts have only observed Superiority phenomena in Turkish when both wh-phrases originate in separate clauses and the movement is cross-clausal, aligning it with languages like English. We show that this generalization does not fully hold and make two central claims. First, Turkish exhibits Superiority effects even in monoclausal contexts, specifically when a wh-adjunct (e.g., where or how often) is in the construction. Secondly, this Superiority effects can be ameliorated by F-marking any constituent within the sentence. These findings show that Superiority is present in Turkish, contrary to previous literature, and that it is sensitive to argument/adjunct distinction as well as to F-marking.