Blend formation in Turkish Sign Language: Are we missing the big picture?


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MAKAROĞLU B.

Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, cilt.17, sa.1, ss.139-157, 2021 (Scopus) identifier

  • Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
  • Cilt numarası: 17 Sayı: 1
  • Basım Tarihi: 2021
  • Doi Numarası: 10.17263/jlls.903361
  • Dergi Adı: Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies
  • Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Scopus, EBSCO Education Source, ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), MLA - Modern Language Association Database
  • Sayfa Sayıları: ss.139-157
  • Anahtar Kelimeler: Blending, Sign languages, Simultaneity, Word creation, Word formation
  • Ankara Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet

Özet

© 2021 Cognizance Research Associates - Published by JLLS.From the point of word formation, the phenomenon of lexical blending is a common productive process, entailing the notion of combination of lexemes in so many languages. In the vast majority of literature on blends, they preserve a linear formation of segments with a shortening of both lexemes. However, in sign languages where morphological categories are mainly encoded by non-concatenative morphology, signed blends can be created by the general mechanism of templatic structures, the combination of lexical bases into a non-linear sequence. Specifically, the main purposes in this study are (i) to provide a comprehensive definition of blending formation in signed modality, (ii) to determine whether there are any structural regularities in the formation of lexical blends in Turkish Sign Language (TİD), and (iii) to classify TİD blends according to well-defined criteria. The corpus data to be studied currently include 109 blending formations. Overall, the results demonstrate that TİD data has familiar properties of blends (named complete blends here) in established spoken languages, as well as modality-specific types of root, simultaneous and initialized blends. We propose a modality-specific categorization, in which blend formation is not limited to linear organization and actual source words.