Hybrid Clause Combining Strategies in Turkish Language Contacts

Abstract The Turkic contact varieties of the Balkans use two main diametrically opposed subordination strategies: (i) the Turkic template, where typical subordinate clauses are prepositive, nonfinite, contain clause‐final subordinators, etc. and (ii) the Indo‐European (IE) template, where typical subordinate clauses are postpositive, finite, contain clause‐initial subordinators, etc. Additionally, Balkan Turkic also uses several kinds of subordinate clauses that allow for various mixtures of these two models (‘X‐clauses’). Spread over a spectrum between the Turkic and IE extremes, X‐clauses can, for instance, be prepositive but contain clause‐initial subordinators. Building on these observations, the present study analyzes clause combining data from two language contact situations, namely Turkish–German contact in Germany and Turkish–English contact in the US, and discusses emerging patterns in these data, typically produced by younger bilingual speakers in informal spoken communicative situations and resembling the X‐clauses in Balkan Turkic.