Turkish Corpus Linguistics

‘Dialect’ is the name given to the sub variants of a language. It is that, because of various factors (such as differences of ethnic origin, social environment and lifestyles, material and moral cultural values, climatic and natural conditions etc.), the spoken form of a language used by a people differs from its written form (standard language) in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Dialect lexicography is forming the lexical data compiled from the vocabulary of a certain dialect or dialects using the methods of lexicography.
The beginning of compiling dialect dictionaries in Turkey does not go back to very old times. The first practices of writing those dictionaries, unlike other studies of dialect lexicography in the world, were carried out with a different purpose. Today, studies on this topic has been considerably increasing.
The aim of this study is to make a description of practices of dialect lexicography in Turkey. It will focus on how and by whom the vocabularies of dialects have been compiled, the criteria of compilation, which methods and techniques have been used in dialect lexicography, and developments in dialect lexicography in Turkey.
Keywords: Dialect researches, Modern Turkish (Anatolian) Dialects, dialect lexicography, compilation, vocabulary.

ÖZET
Bu çalışma; /+CA/ ekvatif durum eki, /+I/ üçüncü teklik iyelik eki ve /+A/ datif durum ekinden oluşan Türkçe /-CAsInA/ birleşik ekin morfosentaksı üzerinedir.
Araştırma, Türk edebiyatının 459 eserinden oluşan şahsi elektronik derlem üzerine yapılmıştır.
Elde edilen sonuçlar, bu birleşik ekin hem isim ve isim soylu kelimelere hem de fiillere geldiğini göstermektedir.
İsim ve isim soylu kelimelere geldiğinde, zarf yapar.
Fiillere geldiğinde ise, gerundium yapar.
Fiillerde, ekten önce /-mIş/, /-r/ ve /-yor/ ekleri gelebilir. Bu bağlamda, i- fiiilinin kullanımı çok sıktır.

Anahtar kelimeler: derlem dilbilim, birleşik ekler, eklerde kalıplaşma, zarflaşma, /-CAsInA/ eki.

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MORPHOSYNTAX OF THE TURKISH /+CAsInA/ SUFFIX
(SUMMARY)

This paper discusses the morphosyntactic use of the Turkish compound /-CAsInA/ suffix, which is consisted of /+CA/ equative case suffix, /+I/ 3rd person possesive suffix and /+A/ dative case suffix.
The research is realized on a personal electronic corpus consisted of 459 books of Turkish literature.
The results shows that this compound suffix can be used both with nouns or nominal words as well as with verbs.
When it comes to nouns and nominal words, it makes adverbs.
When it comes to verbs, it makes gerunds.
When used with verbs, it’s used after the /-mIş/, /-r/ and /-yor/ suffixes. In this context, the use of the copular i- verb is frequent.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, compound suffixes, stereotypization in suffixes, adverbialization, /-CAsInA/ suffix.

Associative measures are “mathematical formulas determining the strength of association between two or more words based on their occurrences and cooccurrences in a text corpus” (Pecina, 2010, p. 138). The purpose of this paper is to test the 12 associative measures that Text-NSP (Banerjee & Pedersen, 2003) contains on a 10-million-word subcorpus of Turkish National Corpus (TNC) (Aksan et.al., 2012). A statistical comparison of those measures is out of the scope of the study, and the measures will be evaluated according to the linguistic relevance of the rankings they provide.
The focus of the study is basically on optimizing the corpus data, before applying the measures and then, evaluating the rankings produced by these measures as a whole, not on the linguistic relevance of individual n-grams.
The findings include intra-linguistically relevant associative measures for a comma delimited, sentence splitted, lower-cased, well-balanced, representative, 10-million-word corpus of Turkish.

Corpus-based lexical semantic studies have gained a significant place in semantic analysis. In this study, lexical profiles of seemingly synonymous words, i.e., yurt-vatan, ak-beyaz, yollamak-göndermek, are described. Based on this description, some suggestions are
generated for the design of course materials used in Turkish language education. Data of the study was extracted from two corpora: the METU Turkish Corpus and the databases of Turkish National Corpus Project. Following Stubb’s (2002) extended lexical model, profile of the characteristic uses of synonymous words was identified on the basis of collocation, colligation, semantic preference and positional mobility. Corpus-based lexical analysis has revealed the frequent, typical and centeral uses of seemingly synonymous words. This result
shows that school dictionaries and course materials used in Turkish language teaching could be revised and designed via naturally occurring data derived from a representative corpus of Turkish.  ( to cite  : Aksan, Yeşim (2011). Derlem temelli sözcük anlambilimi çalışmalarının Türkçenin eğitimine katkısı [Contribution of corpus-based lexical semantic studies to teaching of Turkish]. L. Uzun & Ü. Bozkurt (Eds.) Theoretical and Applied Researches in Turkish Language Teaching,  345-358. Essen: Die Blaue Eule. )

ÖZET

Bu çalışmada, bugün gereklilik kipi görevinde kullanılan /-mAlİ/
ekinin farklı görevleri ve bu ekle kurulan birleşik yapılar ele alınmıştır.

Elektronik formatta olan ve 442 kitaptan oluşan bilgisayar derleminde yapılan araştırmanın sonuçları, /-mAlİ/ ekinin kendi gereklilik anlamı dışında başka görev ve anlamda kullanıldığını göstermektedir. Bu görevler şunlardır:
a) İstek görevi;
b) İstek ve dilek görevi;
c) İstek ve emir görevi;
d) İstek, emir ve gereklilik görevi;
e) Emir görevi;
f) Şüphe görevi;
g) Kesinlik görevi.

/-mAlİ/ ekinin bazı birleşik yapılarda da yer aldığı görülmüştür. O
yapılar da şunlardır:
a) /-AcAk/ olmalı;
b) /-mİş/ olmalı;
c) /-r/ olmalı;
d) /-yor/ olmalı.

Bu birleşik yapılarda fiiller “tahmin” ve “ihtimal” görevlerini
kazanmıştır.

Anahtar kelimeler: gereklilik kipi, /-mAlİ/ eki, dilek kipleri, morfoloji, morfosentaks, derlem dilbilim.


MORPHOSYNTAX OF THE TURKISH SUFFIX /-mAlİ/:
COMPUTER CORPUS BASED RESEARCH

ABSTRACT

This study discusses the different functions of the Turkish /-mAlİ/ necessitative marker and compound structures made with it.

The results of the study made on a computer corpus consisted of 442 books in electronic format shows that the /-mAlİ/ marker, beside of his own necessitative function, also is used in other functions and meanings. These functions are as follows:
a) Optative;
b) Optative and desiderative;
c) Optative and imperative;
d) Optative, imperative and necessitative;
e) Imperative;
f) Doubt;
g) Certainty.

/-mAlİ/ marker is also seen in some compound forms. These forms are as follows:
a) /-AcAk/ olmalı;
b) /-mİş/ olmalı;
c) /-r/ olmalı;
d) /-yor/ olmalı.

In these compound forms, verbs gains “prediction” and “possibility” functions.

Keywords: necessitative mood, /-mAlİ/ morphology, morphosyntax, corpus linguistics.

Предавање одржано во Македонската академија на науките и уметностите (МАНУ) во Скопје на 25.09.2015 во рамките на месечните лингвистички средби "Colloquia Linguistica".

ENGLISH:
"Corpus-Based Lexicographical and Phraseological Researches: Turkish Experiences"
Lecture in the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts (MANU) in Skopje, held September 25th, 2015, as part of the "Colloquia Linguistica" monthly meetings.

TÜRKÇE:
"Derlem-Bazlı Sözlükbilim ve Deyimbilim Araştırmaları: Türk Tecrübeleri"
Makedonya Bilimler ve Sanatlar Akademisi'nde 25.09.2015 tarihinde aylık "Colloquia Linguistica" karşılaşmaları dahilinde yapılan sunum (konferans).

Demirşahin, I. (2015). Discourse Structure in Turkish. PhD Thesis, ODTÜ, Ankara.
This thesis investigates the structure of immediate discourse in Turkish. The first and foremost question is how discourse is built. Are there components of discourse that constitute a predicate-argument structure, or is discourse realized by underlying non-structural ties that are merely made explicit by these components? If there is structure in discourse, what is the nature of this structure, and what is its complexity?
For this purpose, we analyze the relations annotated in the Turkish Discourse Bank, and their counterparts annotated on the Spoken Turkish Corpus Demo specifically for this study. Through close examination of inter-relational configurations identified in these corpora, we investigate deviations from tree-structure and attempt at eliminating the deviations without compromising the meaning of the text. We show that while some of these deviations can be explained away, some of them stem from the nature of discourse as well as syntactic asymmetries of the components of the discourse relations, and should be accommodated by the discourse theory.
Building upon our findings from the data, we discuss what role discourse connectives play in building the discourse structure. We argue that although discourse relations are best represented as logical predicates, they are fundamentally different from sentence-level predicates. Our conclusion is that the discourse relations anchored by explicit discourse connectives and the inferences represented by implicit discourse connectives are a representation of the structure we perceive in the text, as opposed to sentence-level predicates that build an argument structure and impose linguistic restrictions on their arguments.

This paper documents the empirical use of the Turkish temporal-deictic expression o zaman ‘then, in that case, at that time’ in narrative discourses by Turkish-German bilingual children, contrasting it against monolingual usages. The main hypothesis is that the procedural micro-structure of functional elements changes under the influence of language contact and that such changes can be observed in discourse varieties of Turkish spoken in Germany. The study conducts a functional-pragmatic comparison of some exemplary uses of o zaman by analysing its communicative potential in the constellations in which it occurs.

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the rhetorical, political speeches of Julian the emperor using computational tools. For this reason, in this research we apply corpus linguistics techniques for the automatic extraction of word, collocation lists and lexical bundles from Julian’s speeches; using corpus linguistics techniques we will draw conclusions about his style and character.

KEYWORDS

Byzantine Greek Literature, Corpus Linguistics, Stylistics, Rhetorical and political speeches.