An analysis of reference tracking in Turkish written discourse

Abstract This study investigates the reference-tracking strategies employed in children’s storybooks written in Turkish, a pro-drop language. It also examines how the pro-drop property of Turkish influences the use of referring expressions (noun phrases, overt pronouns, and null pronouns) in subject position, particularly in the contexts of topic re-introduction and topic maintenance. To this end, a self-compiled corpus consisting of two hundred storybooks targeting children aged one to seven was created. The data were analyzed using the Mann–Whitney U test. The findings show that re-introduction contexts contain more noun phrases and fewer overt or null pronouns. By contrast, maintenance contexts feature a greater number of null pronominal subjects than overt pronouns and noun phrases. In both referential contexts, overt pronouns are used infrequently than noun phrases and null subjects. These results indicate that noun phrases and null pronouns align with the discourse characteristics of their referents, whereas overt pronouns exhibit a limited relationship with the characteristics of their referents. The findings also suggest that the pro-drop property of Turkish significantly shapes the use of referring expressions in maintenance contexts.