Interpretation of Turkish reflexive anaphors: subjecthood vs semantic role

Abstract

The current study investigates what factors control the interpretation of Turkish third person reflexive anaphors kendi and kendisi. Our results indicate that, in certain contexts, kendi and kendisi behave alike, which is a novel finding. We show that both kendi and kendisi have a slight subject-orientation, and they are sensitive to semantic roles, being perceiver-oriented. Lastly, our results show that word order affects the interpretation of kendi and kendisi, and that they prefer salient preceding DPs. Based on our findings as a whole, we suggest that both kendi and kendisi show some pronominal properties, and we suggest that Kornfilt’s (2001) proposal that kendisi can function as a pronoun might be extended to kendi as well.