Indexicals in the acquisition of Turkish as a second language a parametic examination of indexicals in L2 Turkish

Indexicals are lexical items that lack proper denotation but gain semantic content as they anchor discourse participants. This definition allows us to include first and second person pronouns, temporal adverbs, locative adverbs and social status markers. For decades, indexicals were assumed to directly and only anchor discourse participants irrespective of their structural position in the sentence. Later, it was found that they can shift their reference to the relevant lexical items when they appear in finite complement clauses in some languages, which hinted at the parametric nature of the phenomenon. Turkish and it structural kins are the language where indexicals shift their reference from discourse to matrix clause. This parametric difference raises questions related to the second language (L2) acquisition of Turkish. The most important one concerns the acquisition performance of the students whose first language (L1) does not allow shifting. This paper, a first in the literature, offers new opportunities to test the parametric organization of the theory of Universal Grammar. It investigates the effects of L1 with respect to the shift/no-shift parameter in L2 Turkish.