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

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Table 5.1
Syllable Structure
Turkish Phonology and Morphology (Türkçe Ses ve Biçim Bilgisi)
up meaningful words in his language. Second, it can be inferred from his correctly
formed sentence that he knows how to use these words in a sentence. For
example, he knows that oku- is a verb; therefore, he attaches the verbal morpheme
-yor to it, and only in that order. He also knows that it can be used with a
preceding modifier such as yanl›fl in the example. So, Gürkan knows not only the
sounds that form a word, but also the structure and use of that word. He knows
what other forms can be used within a word; what can be used before and after
a word as well as what categories they belong to. He follows all these rules, of
course, subconsciously to form meaningful words. In more linguistic terms, this
is what constitutes a morphological study: an analysis of word structure and of
the rules governing derivation, inflection, and word formation (see Units 6 and 7
for more on this).
That the native speakers of a language, even as young as Gürkan, can deal
with the interplay of many linguistic factors comes as no surprise. It is a widely
accepted view that a great body of knowledge for such processes is available to
them in their mental storage called the lexicon. A native speaker’s lexicon includes
information similar to the type included in a dictionary. It is common knowledge
that a dictionary is composed of a list of words accompanied by information about:
the form and meaning of words and phrases, the categorization of words, the
usage of words and phrases, and relationships between words and phrases.
Similarly, when a word is called in the lexicon, or the so called mental dictionary,
to be used in communication, it is retrieved based on this kind of information.
Such implicit knowledge enables all native speakers to have clear notions about
the word stock of their language.
THE STRUCTURE OF WORDS
Syllable Structure vs Morpheme Structure
There are different ways of analyzing word structure. We will be discussing only
two of them in this part. One is through analyzing syllable structure. In this kind
of analysis, the focus is on the sounds forming a particular word. Consider the
segmentation of the words hastaland›m and yaflland›m as shown in Table 5.1.
Note that C stands for consonant and V for vowel.
1 st syllable 2 nd syllable 3 rd syllable 4 th syllable
word 1 has- -ta -lan -d›m
hastaland›m CVC CV CVC CVC
word 2 yafl -lan -d›m X
yaflland›m CVC CVC CVC X
As you can see, the word hastaland›m is composed of five syllables having the
CVC-CV-CVC-CVC syllable structure; whereas, yaflland›m has only three syllables
having the CVC-CVC-CVC structure. It is true that words consist of sound sequences,
but sounds and sound structure are the concern of phonology. The unit of analysis
in morphology, however, is the morpheme. So, another way of understanding
word structure is through analyzing component morphemes. Now consider the
morphological divisions in the above examples given in Table 5.2. disregarding
their phonological structure.