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.

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