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

1-22

Authors: Sinan Çakır

This study aims to draw attention to two of the problems that Turkish lexicography faces today. One of these problems is that there are not any Turkish to Turkish dictionaries that have been prepared for the people who are learning Turkish as a second or foreign language. Another problem that faces Turkish lexicography is the deficiency of a corpus-based approach in dictionary building process. In this study, the layout of a dictionary that was prepared for the native speakers of Turkish was analyzed, and some modifications were suggested for the learner’s version of this dictionary. The importance of corpus based approach in dictionary building process is the other point that is emphasized throughout the study. The study consists of two parts. In the first part, the modifications that can be made on a Turkish-to-Turkish dictionary were determined through the analyses of two English-to-English dictionaries, one of which was prepared for the native speakers of English and the other for the foreign learners of English. The possible modifications that can be done in the front-back matters and the A-Z entries of the Turkish Dictionary were presented in a list. In the second part, the entry structures of three headwords presented in the Turkish dictionary were modified to be used in the suggested “learner’s version” of this dictionary. In the study, the data obtained from the web were used as a mini- corpus to show the advantages of having a corpus based approach in lexicography. This mini corpus was used in the modification of the entry structures of the target headwords.

35-60

Authors: Emel Kökpınar Kaya

Discourse markers that are largely used in everyday talk carry out various functions in conversations. One of the conversational genres in which discourse markers are highly used is conversational narrative. Conversational narratives are the interactional productions of (the) teller(s) and listener(s), and also they are the textual reflections of the events that are experienced in past time and told in a sequence in the time of storytelling. In this stoytelling which comprises of a sequence of events, both tellers and listeners use discourse markers for different purposes. This study aims to demonstrate the functions of ondan sonra as a discourse marker in Turkish conversational narratives. To this end, this study grounds on Conversation Analysis (Jefferson, 1978; Sacks et al., 1974) and Narrative Analysis (Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Labov 1972, 1997). The analysis which is carried out in the interface of these two study fields focuses on the narrative, conversational and interpersonal functions of ondan sonra in conversational storytelling. The data of the study includes 100 single and 12 complex conversational narratives gathered from 11 recordings of natural conversations in family gatherings whose participants are native speakers of standard Turkish. The findings show that ondan sonra has various teller- and receiver-oriented functions in addition to the function of ‘continuity marker used in order to sequence the events’ as Özbek (1998a) suggested. The teller-oriented functions for narrative structure are sequencing the events in an temporal order, connecting the bound narratives to the first one, initiating the category of Complicating Action and initiating the category of Resolution. For conversational organisation, the teller-oriented functions are taking the turn and holding the floor, and for interpersonal interaction the only teller-oriented function is attracting the attention of the receivers to a specific point. In addition to them, the analysis shows that receivers use ondan sonra in order to initiate a turn and show their interest to the storytelling in conversational narratives.

87 - 127

Authors: B. Ümit Bozkurt & Gülsün Leylâ Uzun

The purpose of this research is to discuss the conceptualization theory and approaches on the basis of linguistic data which were obtained from children at the age of 10 and 13. From this point of view, in the study, first, the concepts were handled in terms of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology and then, classical, prototype-based, theory-based and atomistic approaches were discussed. In the study which is qualitative, data were collected from the participants in order to determine the prototypes, features and lexical varieties of the concepts. The research group, from whom data were collected, was composed of 4th and 7th grade students of five elementary schools in four different cities in Turkey. In the data collection stage, three open ended-short answered survey forms related to the five representatively chosen concepts were used and a database of 28.183 words was formed with the collected data. In the analysis of the data, content analysis and descriptive analysis were used. The findings of the research demonstrated that typicality and family resemblance relation plays a significant role in conceptualization; however examples, attitude, collocation and scripting based associations come to the forefront while expressing the features of the concepts and using the concepts linguistically. This case indicates that the participant children have a conceptualization structure patterned with associations. With the obtained data, it can be regarded that there are prototypical effects; maybe some definitions need to be added; moreover, all kinds of personal and cultural knowledge is added to the concepts. This implies that all descriptive knowledge types are united with concepts. Accordingly, all these knowledge are considered as collateral, but it is hard to say that they are the constituents of the concept.

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.