Mersin University Journal of Linguistics and Literature (Mersin Üniversitesi Dil ve Edebiyat Dergisi

1-33

Authors: Selma Ayşe Özel, Yasin Bektaş & Hakan Yılmazer

Formulaic sequences are the most frequently occurred forms in a language. Identification of formulaic sequences in language is useful for a wide range of areas including linguistics, second language learning, natural language processing, etc. To identify formulaic sequences in a language, the most preferred method is to use a corpus, which may be formed from written texts or tape-recorded conversations in the language, and count the frequencies of sequences in the corpus. Then, most frequently occurring sequences are examined to find formulas. Numerous studies have been made to identify formulas for several languages like English. There exists only few studies about formulaicity in Turkish and most of these studies focus on identifying formulas in the forms of multi word units. Turkish, however, is an agglutinating language having a rich and complex morphology, therefore formulaic sequences in affixation should be discovered. Only very limited studies about formulaicity in affixation of Turkish exist in the literature. In this study, we try to discover formulaic sequences in affixation of Turkish by counting frequent suffix n-grams in written and spoken Turkish by using the Turkish National Corpus, which is a balanced, large scale, and general-purpose corpus for contemporary Turkish. We list the most frequent suffix combinations not only for verbs but also for all lexical categories like noun, adjective, verb, and adverb for both written and spoken corpora from Turkish National Corpus, and discuss similarities and differences in affixation in written and spoken usage of Turkish. We observe that, we prefer shorter suffix sequences in spoken Turkish than in written Turkish, and as the length of the suffix n-grams increase, we use different formulaic sequences in written and spoken Turkish.

53 - 70

Authors: Mustafa Aksan, Devrim Alıcı & Umut Ufuk Demirhan

Successive affixation in agglutinative languages derives complex structures. This study introduces frequency information of affix sequences in verbal domain from a corpus data. Recurent patterns of "morphgrams" formed by combinations of voice suffixes from non-finite template with other verbal inflections from finite template are extracted from the corpus. Starting with the simple two-morphgram patterns to the most complex nine-morphgrams, affix sequences are cited in the corpora. Samples indicate that Turkish do not derive monsterous words but rather limits the number of affixes that may be attacehed to a verb root or stem. Various statistical calculations also indicated the significance of grammatical patterns of affixes. The method and findings of the study have implications for morphological processing in agglutinative languages.

1-37

Authors: Aslı Altan

Relative clauses in Turkish (Haig, 1997; Hankamer & Knect, 1976) and their acquisition in first language (L1) Turkish (Slobin, 1986; Ekmekçi, 1990; Özcan, 1997; Özge et al, 2010) has been the topic of many studies. The aim of this study is to analyze the relative clause (RC) constructions used by participants who speak Turkish as a foreign language. The results of this study reveal that L2 Turkish speakers use fewer RC structures compared to L1 speakers. An analysis of written and oral data collected from L2 speakers show that they used more subject RCs, whereas native speakers use more object RCs. These findings support the Structural Distance Hypothesis, which predicts that subject RCs are easier to process than object RCs since fewer boundaries intervene between the gap and the head.

71-94

Authors: Aydın Özbek & Barış Kahraman

Turkish has two different forms of reflexive pronouns: kendi (self) and kendisi (self-3sg). In the field of theoretical linguistics, there are different views regarding the binding relations of these reflexives. One view is that kendi and kendisi can be bound with both the subject of the embedded clause and the subject of the matrix clause. According to another view, kendi is more likely to be bound with the subject of the embedded clause, whereas kendisi can be bound with either the subject of the embedded clause or the subject of the matrix clause. In order to provide evidence for the reflexive interpretation and confirm the validity of existing linguistic analyses in Turkish, we conducted a forced preference task with 64 native speakers of Turkish. Our findings suggest that the interpretations of kendi and kendisi are different in Turkish and that kendi is much freer than kendisi.