turkish phonology and morphology (türkçe ses ve b‹ç‹mb‹lg‹s‹)

Morphology:
The Wordland
INTRODUCTION
Morphology is the land of words, and the morpheme, as the building structure of
words, the sovereign. The wordland in the human mind is called the lexicon. An
understanding of words stored in the lexicon involves an understanding of the
rules that govern the formation of words, similarities and differences in the behavior
of words, and the function of words.
Why is karfl›l›ks›z acceptable, but sevgiliksiz outrageous? What makes evdeler
different from evlerde? Why is evdemler terrible, but dedemler perfectly fine?
Wonders of the wordland are infinite, and understanding them is just like a process
of the mind’s awakening from inattention to linguistic organization. In this process,
the tools of morphology make it possible to become well-informed about the
origins and structure of words as well as the systematicity behind how they are
formen and understood by native speakers.
MORPHOLOGY
Morphology is a sub-field of linguistics. It focuses on how words are composed
and organized in human language. Therefore, a study of morphology reflects the
contents of the mind related to the formal and semantic composition of words.
What does this mean? A vivid memory of mine may serve useful here to explain
my point. One day, my smart 3 year-old nephew, Gürkan, grabbed a book from
my book case and asked me to read it to him. It was a story book written in
English, a language which he did not speak, of course. I felt very much up to
playing a trick, so I started to read it in English. While reading, I looked at his face
from time to time to see his reaction. He was just looking at me and listening very
carefully and patiently. I went on and on. When I finished reading three or four
pages, his older sister Ecem came into the room. As soon as he saw her, he got
up, ran to me, grabbed the book from me, gave it to Ecem and said, ‘Abla, al flunu
sen oku, teyzem hep yanl›fl okuyo!’’ What is it that Gürkan, or any child for that
matter, knows about language to have him react in this way? What kind of formal
linguistic knowledge enables him to form, say, the sentence he formed?
First, he has knowledge of the sounds and the sound system of his native
language. When he heard a sample of a foreign language spoken to him, he
considered it wrong. It was “wrong” because it did not fit in the sound sytem of
his language stored in his mind. He knows what sounds and in what order make