In contrast with languages where anaphors can be classified into pronouns and
reflexives, Turkish has a tripartite system that consists of the anaphors o, kendi, and kendisi.
The syntactic literature on these anaphors has proposed that whereas o behaves like a pronoun
and kendi behaves like a reflexive, kendisi has a more flexible behavior and it can function as
both a pronoun and a reflexive. Using acceptability judgments and a self-paced reading task,
we examined how Turkish anaphors are processed in isolated sentences and within larger
discourse contexts. We manipulated contextual information by creating passages where the
context favored a local, long-distance or extra-sentential referent prior to the appearance of
the anaphor. We measured the effect of the context on participants’ reading times and their
end-of-trial coreference assignments. Our results suggest that contextual information affects
the interpretive possibilities associated with an anaphor, but that the influence of context
depends on the degree to which the anaphor is syntactically constrained.

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• The Interaction of Contextual and Syntactic Information in the Processing of Turkish Anaphors