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

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Summary
Turkish Phonology and Morphology (Türkçe Ses ve Biçim Bilgisi)
1. What is morphology?
Morphology is a sub-branch of linguistics. It is interested
in providing a proper definiton of a word by trying to
understand how simple, complex, and novel words are
formed. A study of morphology includes an analysis of
words into their meaningful components, the rules of
composing and expanding words from meaningful
elements, and the functions of words in sentences.
Morphology is also interested in means of expanding
the vocabulary of a language.
2. What is a morpheme?
Morphemes are the building blocks of words. A
morpheme is the smallest indivisible unit in a word
which has either a meaning or a function. Morphemes
are usually mistaken for syllables which may or may
not be compatible with them.
3. How are morphemes classified?
Morpheme Types
DERIVATINAL INFLECTIONAL FREE
Bound Bound
(prefix-infix-suffix) (suffix)
CONTENT class and/or meaning nouns, verbs,
MORPHEME changing affixes X adjectives, adverbs
e.g. -IIk, -sAI, -CI
suffixes marking postpositions,
FUNCTIONAL X grammatical
relationships pronouns,
MORPHEME e.g. -IAr, -DI, -mIfl determiners,
conjunctions, etc.
4. How are words structured in Turkish?
The most important designing feature of a word is the
fact that the parts of a word combine in a predictable
order. Inflectional morphemes are always used in the
word final position. This means that derivational suffixes
precede inflectional suffixes. However, there may be
cases in which more than one inflectional and/or
derivational suffix can be used in a given word. Then,
there is a predictable order among these too. A switch
in the order of these morphemes yields ungrammatical
forms or forms with different meanings/functions.
5. What is an allomorph?
An allomorph is a variation of a morpheme. A
morpheme is an abstract symbol whose real phonetic
shape may change depending on the phonological
environment in which it occurs. Each of these various
forms of the same morpheme is called an allomorph of
it. Even though allomorphs have different phonetic
shapes, they share the same meaning and function.
However, they do not share the same distribution.
Where one occurs, the other does not. Therefore,
allomorphs are said to be in complementary
distribution.