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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

Chapter 10
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
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Compounds in Turkish CDS
    • 2.1Bare compounds (NN and ADJN)
    • 2.2Possessive compounds (NN-poss )
    • 2.3Other compounds
    • 2.4Exclusions
    • 2.5Frequency of compounds
  • 3.Subject and method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Proportion of compounds
    • 4.2Emergence of compounds
      • 4.2.1Premorphology period: Bare NN compounds
      • 4.2.2The protomorphology period: NN- poss compounds and ADJN compounds
      • 4.2.3Morphology Proper
    • 4.3Productivity in compounds
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 December 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.61.11ket
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Ralli, Angela
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