MA Linguistics candidate Heikal Badrulhisham will be defending his thesis later this month. Badrulhisham's thesis is titled "Formulaicity of affixes in Turkish". 

Date:             Wednesday, November 27, 2019
Time:            10:00 am
Location:      RCB 7402 Saunders Room

Abstract: 

This study examines whether suffix sequences in a Turkish corpus distribute as units (formulas). Most research on formulaicity focused on word-level formulas, while most evidence for affix formulaicity is from psycholinguistic studies, with less evidence from corpus data. This study examines the pattern of cooccurrence of suffixes on high-frequency verbs in the Turkish National Corpus. To capture formulaicity between cooccurring suffixes, this study uses a measurement called risk ratio, which possibly has never been used to measure collocation. The analysis of the risk ratio data suggests that 1) affix formulaicity likely does exist in the corpus, 2) affix formulaicity is a gradient rather than discrete phenomenon, and 3) formulaicity also holds between affixes and stems. The existence of affix formulas suggests that some polymorphemic sequences are stored as wholes in the mental lexicon, despite their apparent decompositionality. Theoretically, the results support psycholinguistic models of morphological processing with both analytic and holistic processing.

Key words:  formulaicity; affixes; Turkish; corpus; risk ratio; psycholinguistic morphological processing

Members of Examining Committee:

Chair: Dr. Suzanne Hilgendorf,
Senior Supervisor: Dr. John Alderete
Supervisor: Dr. Paul Tupper
Supervisor:  Dr. Maite Taboada
External Examiner: Dr. Julian Brooke, University of British Columbia