The Analysis of the Sentence Structures Containing Universal- or Particular Quantifiers in German, Turkish and English in the Light of Victor Yngve’s Depth Hypothesis

Year 2017, Volume: 41 Issue: 2, 177 - 188, 26.12.2017

Özge Sinem İmrağ

Abstract

The memory, which can be defined as the process to conserve and -when
necessary- recall the obtained information and abilities, is divided in two
parts as temporary and permanent memory. Permanent memory is where a lot of
information like grammatical rules is stored. Temporary memory is the kind of
memory which has a limited capacity to conserve information in comparison with
the permanent memory.Sentence making occurs by processing the information stored in temporary
memory for later use in the permanent memory. Memory is not affected by the
number of the words which are composing the sentence, but by the articulation
of these words. In the articulated word strings the meaning emerges from either
left-to-right or right-to-left articulation. According to the depth hypothesis
by Victor Yngve, who claims that left recursive sentence structures increase
the amount of space taken up in the temporary memory, left recursive structures
add to the depth of a sentence. The more the depth of a sentence increases, the
more the psychological complexity of the sentence increases.In German and English, which are conjugative languages, both left
recursive and right recursive sentence structures are to be found. But in
Turkish, which is an agglutinative language, there are usually left recursive
structures. For example noun phrases containing a universal quantifier like
“all” or a particular quantifier like “some” begin in Turkish not with these
quantifiers, but with other elements. Therefore all elements used until the
basic element must be stored in memory. So in German and English it is not necessary
to wait the end of a sentence so as to understand its meaning, but in Turkish the
meaning becomes clear just in the very end of sentence. In this study the
sentence structures containing universal- or particular quantifiers will be
analysed in the light of the depth hypothesis.

Keywords

Memory, Depth Hypothesis, Victor Yngve, Universal/ Particular Quantifier

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