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Morphological Complexity within and across Boundaries: In honour of Aslı Göksel
Edited by Aslı Gürer, Dilek Uygun-Gökmen and Balkız Öztürk
[Studies in Language Companion Series 215] 2020
► pp. 11–38

Abstraction vs. analogy in the Turkish aorist

| Boğaziçi University,
| SYSTRAN
The present study examines adults’ processing of the Turkish Aorist, an irregular pattern the acquisition of which is already shown to pose a huge challenge to children up until the age of 8. We investigate how adults produce the Aorist when presented with non-existent monosyllabic roots and to what extent the outcome reflects the application of a rule or the effect of analogy on stored exemplars. Experimental results, associated with a thorough type/token frequency analysis of the aorist in the BOUN corpus, suggest that a rule-based generalization on the basis of the type count of the -Ar affix is at work for over 85% of productions. Similarity-based generalizations, however, though quite few in number appear to be heavily conditioned by the matching last consonant, the matching first and last consonants, overlapping trigram and quadrigram sequences, but not rhyme in Turkish.
Keywords: inflectional morphology, irregularity, rule-based generalization, analogy-based generalization, type/token frequency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A corpus analysis of the Turkish aorist
  • 3.Theoretical background
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Stimuli
    • 4.2Procedure and participants
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1Rhyme
    • 5.2Other measures of similarity
      • 5.2.1C_C pattern
      • 5.2.2Onset of the root
      • 5.2.3Nucleus of the root
      • 5.2.4Coda consonant and trigrams
  • 6.General discussion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 15 July 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.215.01nak
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