Chapter published in:
Nominal Compound Acquisition
Edited by Wolfgang U. Dressler, F. Nihan Ketrez and Marianne Kilani-Schoch
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 61] 2017
► pp. 231–249

The emergence of nominal compounds in Turkish

A case study on structural simplicity vs. input frequency

| | Istanbul Bilgi University
This study examines the Turkish nominal compounds in a monolingual Turkish-speaking child’s speech and child-directed speech between 1;3–2;0. Compounds constitute about 10% of the nouns in both child and child-directed speech. Of these compounds, about 60–80% are the so-called possessive compounds that have a compound marker in the form of a possessive marker in the target language. Despite the relatively more frequent use of possessive compounds in child-directed speech, morphologically simpler noun-noun compounds emerge earlier. This order of emergence supports the hypothesis that structural simplicity is more important than relative frequency in the acquisition of compounds. Emergence of possessive compounds together with the possessive inflection further supports the analysis of the compound marker as a possessive marker.
Keywords: Turkish, nominal compounds, possessive compounds, structural simplicity, input frequency
Published online: 19 December 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.11ket
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