{"id":17593,"date":"2025-10-27T06:06:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T10:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=17593"},"modified":"2025-10-27T06:06:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T10:06:00","slug":"lf-reading-group-10-29-bergul-soykan-mit-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2025\/10\/27\/lf-reading-group-10-29-bergul-soykan-mit-2\/","title":{"rendered":"LF Reading Group 10\/29 - Berg\u00fcl Soykan (MIT)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker: <\/strong> Berg\u00fcl Soykan (MIT)<br class=\"\"><strong>Title: <\/strong>Limitations on meta questions: insights from Turkish<br class=\"\"><strong>Time: <\/strong>Wednesday, October 29th, 1pm - 2pm<br class=\"\"><strong>Location: <\/strong>32-D461<br class=\"\"><br class=\"\"><strong>Abstract: <\/strong>In this ongoing work, I present data on the basic patterns of Turkish meta questions (MQs) and show that Turkish appears to allow meta-meta questions as in (1), which Trinh, Fox, and Bassi (2025) predict to be problematic according to their recent NELS talk. They claim that speech act verbs are phase heads, and complements of phase heads are spelled out (\u00e1 la Chomsky 2001), which implies that there can be only one silent speech act verb in every (audible) sentence.<br clear='none'\/>\n(1) ??A1: Ela gel-ecek            mi?<br clear='none'\/>\n                           come-Fut        PolQ<br clear='none'\/>\n                    [IA ask [whether Ela will come]]<br clear='none'\/>\n ?????B1: Ela nere-ye         gel-ecek            mi?                                                wh-MQ<br clear='none'\/>\n              where-Dat   come-Fut          PolQ<br clear='none'\/>\n       [where1 youB ask [whether Ela will come where1]]<br clear='none'\/>\nA2:  Ela nere-ye gel-ecek            mi        mi?                                          pol-MQ<br clear='none'\/>\n      *[whether youB  ask [where1 IA ask [whether Ela will come where1]]]<\/p>\n<p>I suggest that the difference between Turkish and English MQs results from 1) their distinct question-formation strategies (e.g., English uses wh-phrases in situ only for MQs, while in-situ-ness is the default form of all questions in Turkish) and 2) from differences in their Spell-Out domains. Given that Turkish always uses wh-in-situ for constituent questions, I propose that C is the phase head in Turkish, not the speech-act verb (or any other v). Also, revising Krifka (2014) and Woods and Vicente (2021), I assume the following structure in (2) for Turkish questions, where Force P indicates whether an utterance has question force [+Q] or not [-Q], and say is the speech act for all utterances that is merged when needed. Thus, I offer a solution to the seeming issue in Turkish MQs along the lines of  Trinh, Fox, and Bassi&#8217;s (2025).<\/p>\n<p>(2)???A1: Ela gel-ecek            mi?<br clear='none'\/>\n             come-Fut          PolQ<br clear='none'\/>\n      [whether1 [Ela will comeF mI1 ForceP[+Q]] Cthat]<br clear='none'\/>\nB1: Ela nere-ye           gel-ecek             mi?                                           wh-MQ<br clear='none'\/>\n               where-Dat      come-Fut          PolQ<br clear='none'\/>\n      [where2 [whether1 [Ela where2 will comeF mI1 ForceP[+Q]] Cthat] sayA]<br clear='none'\/>\nA2: Ela nere-ye  gel-ecek            mi        mi?                                          pol-MQ<br clear='none'\/>\n    [whether3 [where1 [whether1 [Ela where1 will comeF mI1 ForceP[+Q]]F mI3 Cthat] sayA]ForceP[+Q]]<\/p>\n<p>Later, I provide evidence from embedded clauses with an overt C head for the interpretation layers of MQs in Turkish. Finally, if time allows, I share cross-linguistic data from various languages, supporting that the Spell Out domain and question-formation strategies are the two parameters that affect MQ layering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker: Berg\u00fcl Soykan (MIT)Title: Limitations on meta questions: insights from TurkishTime: Wednesday, October 29th, 1pm - 2pmLocation: 32-D461Abstract: In this ongoing work, I present data on the basic patterns of Turkish meta questions (MQs) and show that Turkish appears to allow meta-meta questions as in (1), which Trinh, Fox, and Bassi (2025) predict to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17593\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}