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

Unit 6 - Word-Formation Processes
Blending
It is possible to form a new word by using two word formation processes:
compounding and clipping. The outcome is a blend. For example, the word
Avrasya was created by first clipping the first part of the word Avrupa and then
combining it with the word Asya into a new blend: Avr(upa) + Asya > Avrasya.
Acronyms
Have you ever used the expression Türkiye Radyo ve Televizyon Kurumu 1 in any
context? I suspect your answer would be ‘No’. Even if it is a ‘Yes’, I would assume
you use it very rarely since it is not very economic to use such a long expression.
Instead, we tend to reduce it to the initial letters of the component words as TRT1,
which forms an acronym in Turkish. Other examples are YÖK for Yüksek Ö¤retim
Kurumu, TC for Türkiye Cumhuriyeti, ODTÜ for Orta Do¤u Teknik Üniversitesi,
DGM for Devlet Güvenlik Mahkemesi, ABD for Amerika Birleflik Devletleri, KDV for
Katma De¤er Vergisi, KPDS for Kamu Personeli Dil S›nav›. Turkish speakers do not
often remember that these are acronyms, but rather use them as individual words.
A distinction should be made between acronyms and abbreviations. The
latter is not spelled out as it is shortened; whereas the former is. For example, Sn
is an abbreviation and it is always pronounced in its long form as Say›n, but never
as *s(e) n(e).
Backformation
This is not a productive word formation process in Turkish. One example I first
encountered was in a TV commercial played by Cem Y›lmaz. ‹letiflmek, the last
word of his lines in this commercial struck me as a humorous element first as it
was the first time I heard this verb. Then on a personal account, one of my
colleagues explained how she witnessed that this word is used in actual sentences
such as biz onunla iyi iletifliyoruz in actual conversations. The word iletiflim is
claimed to have appeared in Turkish in the early 70s (Niflanyan, 2003: 186). The
verb iletiflmek seems to have appeared in the early 2000s. Then this can be seen
as a clear case of backformation which displays an example of a simple word
derived from a more complex one: iletiflim > iletifl-. Normally, we would assume
that the direction of derivation is from simple to more complex as has been the
case so far: ilet- > iletifl- > iletiflim. But in fact it is backwards: iletiflim > iletifl-;
therefore, the process is called backformation.
Multiple Processes
More than one word formation process may be used to form new words. For
example, düfle kalka bitirdik involves both derivation and reduplication. Its
counterparts without the derivational suffix *düfl kalk bitirdik, and without
reduplication *düfl bitirdik, *kalk bitirdik yield ungrammatical forms. Other
examples include:
radar acronym for radio detecting and ranging/borrowing
transistor blend (transfer + resistor)/borrowing
kardan adam compounding/suffixation
programla- borrowing/derivation with -la
fax clipping from facsimile/borrowing
teflon coinage/borrowing
sezeryan eponomy (the method by which Julius Caesar was born
(Tatter, 1986: 27)/borrowing (caesarean section)
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