cv

Utku Türk

University of Maryland, 1401 Marie Mount Hall, College Park, MD, 20742

Email: utkuturk@umd.edu

Web: www.utkuturk.com

Github: utkuturk

Interests

morphological planning in sentence production, processing of case, formal models of response bias, typological variability of morphophonology and algorithmic models of linearization, adjectival morphology and degree semantics, documenting un(der)represented languages

Education

### \textbf{Ph.D., Linguistics} (advisors: Colin Phillips & Ellen Lau), 2022-present

### Visiting Researcher, Linguistics (hosts: Shota Momma, Faruk Akkuş), Fall 2025

### \textbf{M.A. in Linguistics} (advisor: Pavel Logačev), 2017-2022

### Visiting Researcher, Linguistics (host: Pavel Caha & Michal Starke), Spring 2020

### \textbf{B.A. in Translation Studies}, 2012-2017

Publications

Refereed Articles

• (In)sensitivity to surface-level heuristics: A case from Turkish verbal attractors. Türk, Utku. 2026. Submitted to Cognition. URL

  paper

• Non-visually-derived mental objects tax ‘visual’ pointers. Xu, X. and Türk, Utku and Dods, A. and Tian, X. and Lau, E.. 2025. (submitted). [preprint]. DOI

  URL

  biorxiv

• Agreement attraction in Turkish: The case of genitive attractors. Türk, Utku and Logaçev, Pavel. 2024. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. DOI

  doi

• Resources for Turkish dependency parsing: Introducing the BOUN Treebank and the BoAT annotation tool. Türk, Utku and Atmaca, Furkan and "Ozateş, \cSaziye Betül and Berk, Gözde and Bedir, Seyyit Talha and Köksal, Abdullatif and "Oztürk Başaran, Balk\iz and Güngör, Tunga and "Ozgür, Arzucan. 2022. Language Resources and Evaluation. DOI

  doi

Chapters

• Controlling morphosyntactic competition through phonology. Türk, Utku. 2025. Nanosyntax and the Lexicalization Algorithm (pp. 411–440). Eds. P. Caha, K. De Clercq, & G. Vanden Wyngaerd. Oxford University Press.
• The phonological nature of the Turkish front glide. Canalis, Stefano and "Ozdemir, Semra and Türk, Utku and Tunçer, "Umit Can. 2024. Selected Essays on Turkish Linguistics: The Anadolu Meeting.

Conference Publications

• Towards a theory of scope rigidity: A case of focus sensitive question particles. Türk, Utku and Hirsch, Aron. 2025. Proceedings of TU+10 (10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic).
• Syntactic alternatives in Turkish polar questions. Türk, Utku and Hirsch, Aron. 2025. Proceedings of the 49th Penn Linguistics Conference (PLC 49).

• Hypothetical comparison in Turkish. Türk, Utku and Demirok, "Omer. 2021. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic. DOI

  doi

• Nanosyntactic analysis of Turkish cases. Türk, Utku and Caha, Pavel. 2021. Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic.

• Tackling the augmentative puzzle in Turkish. Türk, Utku. 2020. Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic. DOI

  doi

• First steps towards Universal Dependencies for Laz. Türk, Utku and Bayar, Kaan and "Ozercan, Ayşegül Dilara and "Oztürk, Görkem Yiğit and "Ozateş, \cSaziye Betül. 2020. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW 2020). URL

  paper

• Turkish treebanking: Unifying and constructing efforts. Türk, Utku and Atmaca, Furkan and "Ozateş, \cSaziye Betül and Köksal, Abdullatif and "Oztürk Başaran, Balk\iz and Güngör, Tunga and "Ozgür, Arzucan. 2019. Proceedings of the 13th Linguistic Annotation Workshop. URL

  paper

• Improving the annotations in the Turkish Universal Dependency Treebank. Türk, Utku and Atmaca, Furkan and "Ozateş, \cSaziye Betül and "Oztürk Başaran, Balk\iz and Güngör, Tunga and "Ozgür, Arzucan. 2019. Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Universal Dependencies (UDW, SyntaxFest 2019). URL

  paper

In Preparation / Submitted

• Review of “Linguistic Illusions: A Case Study on Agreement Attraction” by Dan Parker. Türk, Utku. In preparation. For Linguist List.
• Response bias in Turkish agreement attraction. Türk, Utku. In preparation. repo

• Agreement attraction under uncertainty: A case of register manipulation. Türk, Utku. In preparation. URL

  repo

• Tracking structural cues or relying on probabilistic inference in Turkish agreement?. Bakay, "Ozge and Türk, Utku and Demiray, Duygu and Dillon, Brian. In preparation. URL

  repo

• Effects of frequency in non-local derivational composionality in Turkish. Neu, Eva, Türk, Utku and Bakay, "Ozge. In preparation. URL

  repo

• Quantifying the cross-linguistics effects of syncretism on agreement attraction. Türk, Utku. In preparation. URL

  repo

Projects

The Role of Working Memory in Sentence Processing

Role: Researcher

Analysis of behavioral data from psycholinguistic experiments testing topics including response bias, grammaticality illusions, shallow processing, discourse effects. (R, Stan, brms, tidyverse, IbexFarm, git, OpenSesame, EyeLink)

Deep Learning Based Turkish Dependency Parsing

Role: Researcher

Lead annotator in Universal Dependencies project for Turkish. Creating annotation guidelines for Turkish in the Universal Dependencies framework. (Python, CoNLL-U, udpipe, git, bash, Dependency Parsing, LSTMs, transformer)

Greek and Turkish in Contact: Morphosyntactic Change and its Sociological Causation

Role: Researcher

Statistical analysis of the corpus and geospatial data. Sociolinguistic annotation of the first Cappadocian Greek treebank. (CoNLL-U, udpipe, tidyverse, geospatial analysis)

Teaching

University of Oxford

University of Maryland

Boğaziçi University

Talks & Posters

Talks

• Turkish register manipulation eliminates grammaticality asymmetry in attraction and challenges retrieval based accounts. Türk, Utku. 2025. Talk presented at the 38th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP 2025), University of Maryland, College Park, MD. abstract
• Syntactic alternatives in Turkish polar questions. Türk, Utku and Hirsch, Aron. 2025. Talk presented at PLC 49 (40th Penn Linguistics Circle), University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. abstract
• Register modulates grammaticality asymmetry in Turkish agreement attraction. Türk, Utku. 2025. Talk presented at TU+10 (10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. abstract
• Superiority effects with adjuncts in Turkish. Lewis, Sadira and Türk, Utku. 2025. Talk presented at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting (LSA 2025), Philadelphia, PA. slides
• When do we plan agreement in our speech: Case from agreement attraction in unaccusatives. Türk, Utku and Lau, Ellen and Phillips, Colin. 2024. Talk presented at Puzzles of Agreement. slides

• Novel analysis of response bias challenges representational accounts in attraction. Türk, Utku and Logaçev, Pavel. 2023. Talk presented at Human Sentence Processing (HSP 2023), University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA. abstract

  slides

• Defining borrowing hierarchies in the light of sociolinguistic and geodemographic causation: Contact-induced morphosyntactic change in Asia Minor Greek. Sampanis, Konstantinos and Türk, Utku and Gülsün, Umut. 2021. Talk presented at SLE 54 (Annual Meeting of the Societas Linguistica Europaea); online. abstract
• The more the merrier: A new dependency treebank for Turkish. Türk, Utku and Atmaca, Furkan and "Ozateş, \cSaziye Betül and Berk, Gözde and Bedir, Talha and Köksal, Abdullatif and "Oztürk Başaran, Balk\iz and Güngör, Tunga and "Ozgür, Arzucan. 2020. Talk presented at ICTL 20 (International Conference on Turkish Linguistics); online (Eski\csehir, Turkey).
• The phonological nature of the Turkish front glide. Canalis, Stefano and "Ozdemir, Semra and Türk, Utku and Tunçer, "Umit Can. 2020. Talk presented at ICTL 20 (International Conference on Turkish Linguistics); online (Eski\csehir, Turkey).

• Hypothetical comparison in Turkish. Türk, Utku and Demirok, "Omer. 2021. Also presented at TU+6 (online, University of Toronto) on 2021-02-19.. abstract

  handout

  paper

• When vowel harmony has a say in morpho-syntax: A case from suspended affixation. Türk, Utku. 2021. Talk presented at ConSOLE 29, University of Leiden; online. abstract

  slides

• When glides are obstruents, or Turkish [j]. Canalis, Stefano and "Ozdemir, Semra and Türk, Utku and Tunçer, "Umit Can. 2021. Talk presented at the 18th Old World Conference in Phonology (OCP 18); online (Ibiza). abstract

  slides

• The role of shallow processing in agreement attraction. Türk, Utku and Logaçev, Pavel. 2020. Talk presented at Linguistic Evidence 2020, Universit"at T"ubingen, Germany. abstract

  slides

• Improving the annotations in the Turkish Universal Dependency Treebank. Türk, Utku and Atmaca, Furkan and "Ozateş, \cSaziye Betül and "Oztürk Başaran, Balk\iz and Güngör, Tunga and "Ozgür, Arzucan. 2019. Also presented at the 33rd National Linguistics Conference (Mersin University, Turkey) 2019-05-09/2019-05-10.. paper

  slides

• Decomposing Turkish augmentatives. Türk, Utku. 2019. Talk presented at the 16th Workshop on Syntax, Semantics, and Phonology, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. abstract

  slides

• Is accusative case really the case?. Türk, Utku. 2019. Talk presented at the 13th Linguistics Student Conference, Ankara University, Turkey. slides
• Obligatory adjuncts within Turkish impersonals. Türk, Utku and Dikmen, Furkan. 2019. Talk presented at the 13th Linguistics Student Conference, Ankara University, Turkey. slides

• Effects of vowel characteristics in suspended affixation with root allomorphy. Türk, Utku. 2020. Also listed as a short talk in the CV.. abstract

  slides

• Response bias manipulation in Turkish agreement attraction. Türk, Utku and Logaçev, Pavel. 2020. Also listed as a short talk in the CV.. abstract

  slides

• Timing of agreement in verb planning. Türk, Utku. 2024. Talk presented at the UMass/UMD Psycholinguistics Mixer.
• Maybe, kind NPs are special?. Türk, Utku. 2024. Talk presented at the UMD Psycholinguistics Workshop.
• Hypothetical comparisons. Türk, Utku. 2022.
• Sources of bias in psycholinguistic data. Türk, Utku. 2023. Talk presented at Language Science Lunch Talks, University of Maryland Language Science Center. slides
• The role of shallow processing in agreement attraction. Türk, Utku and Logaçev, Pavel. 2020. Talk presented at BLC (Bo\ugazi\cci Linguistic Circle).
• Is accusative case really the case?. Türk, Utku. 2019. Talk presented at Bo\ugazi\cci University Student Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics (BUSCTEL 2019).

Posters (Refereed)

• Towards a theory of scope rigidity: A case of focus sensitive question particles. Türk, Utku and Hirsch, Aron. 2025. Poster presented at TU+10 (10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA.
• Turkish allows covert scrambling. Türk, Utku and Hirsch, Aron. 2025. Poster presented at TU+10 (10th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic), University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA. abstract
• Speech timing evidence on the (in)dependence of root and inflection access in production. Türk, Utku and Phillips, Colin. 2024. Poster presented at Human Sentence Processing (HSP 2024), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. abstract
• Is the octopus regenerating?: Comparing timing effects in sentence recall and picture description tasks. Dods, Allison and Macdonald, Allison and Türk, Utku and Mancha, Sebasti'an and Phillips, Colin. 2024. Poster presented at Human Sentence Processing (HSP 2024), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. abstract

• Obviation problem in Turkish. Türk, Utku. 2023. Poster presented at TU+8 (8th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic), Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. abstract

  poster

• Nanosyntactic analysis of Turkish cases. Türk, Utku and Caha, Pavel. 2021. Poster presented at TU+6 (6th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic); online (University of Toronto). abstract

  handout

  paper

• First steps towards Universal Dependencies for Laz. Türk, Utku and Bayar, Kaan and "Ozercan, Ayşegül Dilara and "Ozateş, \cSaziye Betül. 2020. Associated short paper in UDW 2020 proceedings.. paper

  poster

• The role of shallow processing in agreement attraction. Türk, Utku and Logaçev, Pavel. 2020. Poster presented at the 33rd Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing; online (Amherst, MA). abstract

  osf

  poster

• An investigation into the nature of the Turkish glide [j]. "Ozdemir, Semra and Türk, Utku. 2020. Poster presented at TU+5 (5th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic), University of Delaware, USA. abstract

  poster

• Tackling the augmentative puzzle in Turkish. Türk, Utku. 2020. Poster presented at TU+5 (5th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkic), University of Delaware, USA. abstract

  poster

• Turkish treebanking: Unifying and constructing efforts. Türk, Utku and Atmaca, Furkan and "Ozateş, \cSaziye Betül and Köksal, Abdullatif and "Oztürk Başaran, Balk\iz and Güngör, Tunga and "Ozgür, Arzucan. 2019. Associated paper in LAW XIII proceedings.. paper

  poster

• Nanosyntax of augmentative in Turkish: Interfix -cI- analysis. Türk, Utku. 2019. Poster presented at the 4th American International Morphology Meeting (AIMM4), Stony Brook University, NY. poster
• Nanosyntax of augmentative in Turkish: Interfix -cI- analysis. Türk, Utku. 2019. Poster presented at the 13th Linguistics Student Conference, Ankara University, Turkey.

Tutorials

• generating consistent linguistic experiment materials with AI. Türk, Utku. URL
• saving pcibex recordings to s3 with a python lambda. Türk, Utku. URL
• montreal forced aligner workflow for pcibex production experiments. Türk, Utku. URL

Skills

Languages: Turkish: native, English: proficient, Spanish: proficient in reading

Tools: R & Stan & \LaTeX{} & Python & JS, OpenSesame & IbexFarm

Grants and Scholarships

• LSC Mini-grant (2500 USD), University of Maryland, College Park (2025)
• ARHU Summer Fellowship (1500 USD), University of Maryland, College Park (2023 & 2024)
• Flagship Fellowship (60000 USD), University of Maryland, College Park. (2022 - 2027)
• Travel Grant for DGfs Summer School - XPrag.de Summer 2019.
• 1.5 year research grant by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey for Deep Learning Based Turkish Dependency Parsing project.
• Faculty of Arts and Sciences Conference Travel Grant, Boğaziçi University. Spring 2019.
• 5 year grant. Merit-based Government Funding for Higher Education, only given to top 100 students (2012 – 2017)

Service

Reviewing

• Journal Article Reviewer, Journal of Memory and Language, Glossa Linguistics, Glossa Psycholinguistics
• Reviewer, Advances in Iranian Linguistics III
• Software Reviewer, rOpenSci, pangoling R package. review available here.
• Reviewer, Computational Psycholinguistic Meeting 2025
• Reviewer, DM meets Nano 2025
• Proceedings reviewer, 5th/6th/11th Workshop on Turkic and Languages in Contact with Turkish. LSA Archive.

Conference Service

• Organization Committee, MayFest Production 2026
• Organization Committee, Human Sentence Processing (HSP) Conference (2025)
• Organization Committee, MayFest Constraints on Meaning 2025
• Conference chair, Student Conference on Linguistics, Istanbul, Turkey. scol 2022
• Conference chair, Busctel 2020: Boğaziçi University Student Conference in Theoretical and Experimental Linguistics. Department of Linguistics, Boğaziçi University
• Co/organizer and Reviewer, Busctel 2019
• Co/organizer and Reviewer, Busctel 2018

Administrative work

• Senator, University of Maryland (2025 - ongoing)
• Organizer, B\textttLing Workshop, University of Maryland Linguistics (2024 - ongoing)
• Graduate Student Representative, University of Maryland Linguistics (2024-2025)
• Board Member, University of Maryland Language Science Center Graduate Student Board. (2023 - 2025)
• Committee Member, University of Maryland Linguistics Colloquium Committee. (2023 - 2025)