Storage and Computation of Multimorphemic Words in Turkish
- Rabia Ergin, Cognitive Science Program, Boğaziçi, Istanbul, Turkey
- Emily Morgan, Linguistics, UC Davis, Davis, California, United States
- Timothy O’Donnell, Department of Linguistics, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
AbstractWhether morphologically complex words are stored as a whole or decomposed into constituents has been well-investigated experimentally in Indo-European languages like English, Italian, Dutch and French. There is substantial evidence in these languages in favor of and architecture which allows both decomposition and storage. This study investigates how morphologically complex words involving two or more morphemes are represented in Turkish which, unlike Indo-European languages, is renowned for its highly rich morphology. Applying a probabilistic tradeoff-based model of morphological storage and computation (O’Donnell 2015) to a corpus of Turkish word forms, we derive predictions about stored patterns in the language. We discuss these patterns and propose several for future experimental investigation.