Enes Us

About Me

Hello! I am an M.A. student at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey and a member of the METU Language and Cognitive Development Laboratory. I completed my B.A. in Foreign Language Education with minors in Psychology at the same institution in 2022.

I have worked on children's interpretation of disjunction under the guidance of Duygu Özge Sarısoy (Thesis, Slides).

My primary research interests are in experimental semantics and pragmatics and I am especially interested in language acquisition. I have previously worked on ellipsis, conditionals and disjunction.

Additionally, I have experience teaching English as an academic language and I am currently teaching at TOBB University of Economics and Technology.

Publications

• Enes Us , Duygu Sarısoy (under review). "Morphological access to alternatives fails to boost scalar implicatures: Interpretation of disjunction in Turkish-speaking children."
  Show Abstract
  Sentences involving disjunction, such as “The girl likes pizza or pasta” often give rise to the inference that she does not like both. However, several studies report that children tend to interpret the sentence inclusively (i.e., she likes pizza or pasta, or possibly both) or conjunctively (i.e., she likes both). The alternatives-based account attributes this to children’s difficulty accessing stronger lexical alternatives, while the ambiguity account proposes that disjunction is ambiguous for children. In this study, we tested these competing predictions using a Truth-Value Judgment Task with Turkish-speaking children, drawing on the unique morphology of Turkish disjunction markers, one of which contains the stronger alternative. Overall, children interpreted disjunctions inclusively or conjunctively, but not exclusively, even when a disjunction marker could facilitate access to a stronger alternative. These findings challenge the alternatives-based account and align with the ambiguity account, suggesting that access to a stronger alternative alone is not sufficient for achieving adult-like interpretations.
• Enes Us (in press). "Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis in Turkish." In Proceedings of the 18th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics. [PDF]
  Show Abstract
  Turkish allows null object constructions, and these constructions show certain properties, suggesting the presence of ellipsis operation. Previous analyses argue that these properties follow from Argument Ellipsis, but I argue that Verb-stranding VP analysis is present in Turkish. Providing evidence from the ellipsis of predicates, null adverb interpretations, and light verbs, I propose that VP internal constituents are not elided independently but rather they go unpronounced as part of the deletion of larger constituents (VPs).

Selected Presentations

• Enes Us, Özhan Alp Şehit, Duygu Özge Sarısoy. (2025). "Revisiting Turkish X-marking: An Experimental Rating Study." Upcoming Talk at the Conditional Constructions Across World Languages, INALCO, October 29-31.
• Enes Us, Duygu Özge Sarısoy. (2025). "Ambiguity or Implicature? Insights from Turkish-speaking Children’s Interpretation of Disjunction." Upcoming Talk at the The 18th conference on Syntax, Phonology and Language Analysis, [SinFonIJA 18], Ss Cyril and Methodius University, September 26-27.
• Enes Us, Duygu Özge Sarısoy. (2025). "Ambiguity or Implicature? Insights from Interpretation of Disjunction in Turkish- speaking Children." Upcoming Poster at the Experimental Pragmatics Conference 2025 [XPRAG 2025], University of Cambridge, September 17-19.
• Enes Us. (2024). "Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis in Turkish." Talk at the 18th Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics [WAFL18/SICOGG26], Jeonbuk National University, August 22-24. [Slides]
• Enes Us, Elif Yılmaz, Deniz Zeyrek-Bozşahin. (2024). "Production of Conditionals in English and Turkish-speaking Children." Poster at the 10th International Symposium on Brain and Cognitive Science [ISBCS], Middle East Technical University, June 1. [Poster]
• Enes Us. (2024). "Verb-Stranding VP Ellipsis in Turkish." Talk at the Konstanz Linguistics Conference [KLC], University of Konstanz, March 21-22.

Contact

Email: enes.us@metu.edu.tr Copy