FORMULAICITY WITHIN TURKISH WORDS

One of the main insights to emerge from the last fifty years of corpus linguistics has been a greater understanding of the pervasiveness of formulaic language. Rather than exercising the full generative capacity of language, speakers and writers have been shown to rely to a great extent on conventional, pre-constructed phrases drawn from memory. Turkish presents a particularly interesting and challenging case because its agglutinative structure means that messages which are spread across several orthographic words in English are often expressed within a single word in Turkish. While it is possible that this difference in structure will mean that new types of formulaicity will emerge in Turkish, a good starting place may be to consider the extent to which types of formulaicity which are known to exist in English at the multi-word level exist in Turkish at the sub-word level. The research discussed here set out to examine this possibility, looking in particular at three types of formulaicity: collocations, lexical bundles and collostructions.