This book contains 48 papers presented at the Fourteenth International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, held by Ankara University in August 6-8, 2008. The contributions to this conference cover a wide range of topics in theoretical, descriptive and applied linguistics relating to Turkish and Turkic languages in discussing a great variety of issues related to phonology and phonetics, morphology, syntax and semantics, pragmatics and discourse, language acquisition, language contact, and applied linguistics, as they have been grouped in this volume. Although the main focus of the volume is on Turkish linguistic issues, there are also a number of articles in different modern linguistic frameworks dealing with Turkic languages and Turkish dialects. The book will be appealing to anyone interested in current issues in theoretical linguistics as well as those who are working on Turcology, linguistic typology, contact linguistics, and applied linguistics.

Turkish is a member of the Turkic family of languages, which extends over a vast area in southern and eastern Siberia and adjacent portions of Iran, Afganistan, and China. Turkic, in turn, belongs to the Altaic family of languages. This book deals with the morphological and syntactic, semantic and discourse-based, synchronic and diachronic aspects of the Turkish language. Although an interest in morphosyntactic issues pervades the entire collection, the contributions can be grouped in terms of relative attention to syntax, semantics and discourse, and acquisition.

The topics include areas related to macroeconomics and monetary economics (inflation expectations, determinants of monetary policy), labor economics (earning differences, overeducation in labor markets), health economics (adult obesity), tourism economics (tourism response to disruptive events) and energy economics (solar energy systems).

Exploring the Turkish Linguistic Landscape provides in-depth analyses of different aspects of Turkish in the domains of phonology, morphology and syntax, discourse and language acquisition relevant to recent theoretical discussions. While some of the papers in the volume offer new analyses to known linguistic puzzles, others raise new questions which have not been addressed in the literature before. This collection of original articles written by colleagues and students of Prof. Eser Erguvanlı-Taylan, honoring her contribution to the field of linguistics, features articles on vowel reduction, consonant clusters, negation, conditionals, voice morphology, evidentiality, acquisition of irregular morphology, complementation and subordination in varieties of Turkish. It will be of interest to a wide audience ranging from theoreticians to typologists and is expected to generate further research on Turkish, as well as to contribute to the cross-linguistic literature on the issues addressed in the volume.

Heritage language bilingualism refers to contexts where a minority language spoken at home is (one of) the first native language(s) of an individual who grows up and typically becomes dominant in the societal majority language. Heritage language bilinguals often wind up with grammatical systems that differ in interesting ways from dominant-native speakers growing up where their heritage language is the majority one. Understanding the trajectories and outcomes of heritage language bilingual grammatical competence, performance, language usage patterns, identities and more related topics sits at the core of many research programs across a wide array of theoretical paradigms. The study of heritage language bilingualism has grown exponentially over the past two decades. This expansion in interest has seen, in parallel, extensions in methodologies applied, bridges built between closely related fields such as the study of language contact and linguistic attrition. As is typical in linguistics, not all languages are studied to the same degree. The present volume showcases what Turkish as a heritage language brings to bear for key questions in the study of heritage language bilingualism and beyond. In many ways, Turkish is an ideal language to be studied because of its large diaspora across the world, in particular Europe. The papers in this volume are diverse: from psycholinguistic, to ethnographic, to classroom-based studies featuring Turkish as a heritage language. Together they equal more than their subparts, leading to the conclusion that understudied heritage languages like Turkish provide missing pieces to the puzzle of understanding the variables that give rise to the continuum of outcomes characteristic of heritage language speakers.