This dissertation

The study of MWS, also known as the formulaic perspective, has provided important insights in a range of fields including corpus linguistics, psycholinguistics, language pedagogy, and theoretical linguistics (see also Wray, 2008; Durrant, 2013; Gablasova et al. 2017a; Siyanova- Chanturia & Martinez, 2014). However, as Durrant (2013) also suggests, an important weakness in this field of study is that it focusses only on narrow range of languages, particularly on English. That is to say, the benefits of adopting a formulaic perspective was limited to these narrow range of languages, and also the status of MWS as a general feature of language remains insufficiently established. It is therefore important that the study on MWS should focus on

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languages with different typological profiles. At this point, Biber (2009) noted that English has minimal inflectional morphology but a large set of grammatical function words. These two factors are the central determinants of MWS that are common in English. However, there is only little research on MWS realised in morphologically rich agglutinating languages such as Turkish and Finnish. The agglutinating languages are interesting areas of exploration for formulaic perspectives since they employ extensive system of suffixes to build up complex word forms. In other words, in these languages, formulaic patterns are found within words (see Durrant, 2013), as well as between words. Put simply, some morphemes co-occur more frequently than others. In this regard, Durrant (2013) suggests that verbal, inflectional, high- frequency morphemes enter into collocational relations with their syntagmatic neighbours. This study is primarily interested in the extent to which the same mechanisms such as single- word and phrasal frequency affect the processing of MWS in typologically different languages, English and Turkish. Furthermore, it also investigates to what extent the same mechanisms affect the processing of collocations in L1 and L2. The next section provides some background information about the morphological structure of Turkish, an agglutinating language.

2.3.1 Turkish, an agglutinating language.

Turkish, like Hungarian and Finnish, is an agglutinating language, including words that are very long and complex. The suffixation is the main word formation process, in which the new words are formed by attaching an affix to the right of a base form, also known as the root. Traditionally the Turkish suffixes are divided into derivational and inflectional suffixes. Derivation is defined as the creation of a new lexical item (Göksel & Kerslake, 2005 p. 52). Inflectional suffixes, on the other hand, are used to mark functional relations such as case, person, and tense Göksel & Kerslake, 2005 p. 68). The suffixes that can be attached to nominals are known as nominal inflectional suffixes, and they are used to mark number, possession and

case. Turkish has five case suffixes: accusative, dative, genitive, locative, and ablative. Unlike derivational suffixes, inflectional suffixes are perceived as productive (see examples 1a to 1e). There are also examples of noun inflections in Turkish where plural, person, and case occur together (see examples 2a to 2b).

(1a) suyu (the water) water-ACC

(1b) suya (to the water) water-DAT

(1c) suda (in the water) water-LOC

(1d) sudan (from water) water-ABL

(1e) sunun (of the water) water-GEN

(2a) sularının (of the waters) water-PL-P3S-GEN (2b) sularında (in their waters)

water-PL-P3S-LOC

2.3.3 Research questions.

The present study sets out to investigate the factors affecting the processing of two-word adjective-noun collocations in Turkish and English. Before setting up a psycholinguistic experiment to look at the online processing of the collocations in the two languages, this study firstly designed a corpus study to contrastively explore collocations’ frequency of occurrence

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and association statistics in English and Turkish. The main goal of this corpus study is to explore in what ways language typology, particularly the agglutinating structure of the Turkish language affects the collocability of adjectives and nouns. In this corpus study, frequency counts and association statistics of Turkish and English adjective-noun collocations are contrastively explored with the aim of addressing two research questions below (see chapter 4 for how these research questions are addressed).

i. How different (or similar) are frequency counts and association statistics for translation-equivalent English and Turkish adjective-noun collocations?

As Durrant (2013) also suggested, word combinations in Turkish are predicted to be less frequent than their equivalents in English. Since meanings which require multiple word expressions in English can be expressed using a single word in Turkish, individual word forms (lexemes) are expected to have lower frequency counts than their English equivalents. Therefore, collocations and other type of MWS are also predicted to have, on average, lower frequency scores in Turkish than their equivalents in English.

ii. How different (or similar) are the frequency and association scales for unlemmatised and lemmatised English and Turkish adjective-noun collocations?

Due to the agglutinating structure of Turkish, I would predict to find a notably larger difference between the unlemmatised and lemmatised Turkish collocations’ frequency and association counts than English collocations’ frequency and association counts.

The psycholinguistic experiments set out to ascertain the extent to which L1 English and Turkish participants rely on the same mechanisms for processing adjective-noun collocations. Furthermore, the present study explores whether the participants’ response times (RTs) for adjective-noun collocations mirror the patterns emerged from the corpus study, in relation to the collocations’ frequency of occurrence and collocational strength. Moreover, the present study ascertains whether the same factors affect L1 English and advanced L1 Turkish-English L2 learners’ processing of collocations (see chapter 6 chapter for how these research questions are addressed).

i. Do both L1 speakers of Turkish and English process the high-frequency collocations faster than the low-frequency collocations, and the low frequency collocations faster than the baseline items?

L1 speakers of both Turkish and English will process the high-frequency collocations faster than the low-frequency collocations, which will in turn would be processed faster than the baseline items. This prediction is largely based on the findings of the previous studies that both L1 and advanced L2 speakers are sensitive to the frequency of the MWS (e.g. Arnon & Snider, 2010; Wolter & Yamashita, 2018; Yi, 2018)

ii. Does L1 speakers of Turkish process both high- and low-frequency collocations more rapidly than L1 speakers of English?

L1 speakers of Turkish will process both high-frequency and low-frequency adjective-noun collocations more rapidly than L1 speakers of English. This hypothesis is based on findings of

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the corpus study (see Chapter 4 for the corpus study) that lemmatised collocations have considerably higher collocational strength in Turkish than their equivalents in English.

iii. Do lemmatised collocation level frequency counts have a larger effect on the processing of Turkish collocations than English collocations?

Lemmatised collocation-level frequency counts will have a larger effect on the processing of Turkish adjective-noun collocations than English adjective-noun collocations. This hypothesis is based on results of a corpus study (see Chapter 4 for the corpus study).

iv. Do single word-level frequency counts have a larger effect on the processing of Turkish collocations than English collocations?

Word-level frequency counts of the nouns will have a larger effect on the processing of Turkish adjective-noun collocations than English adjective-noun collocations. This hypothesis is based on the results of the corpus study (see Chapter 4 for the corpus study) that Turkish adjective- noun collocations have many more inflected forms than their equivalents English.

v. Do both L1 English and advanced level L1 Turkish-English L2 speakers show sensitivity to both collocational and single-word level frequency counts?

L1 Turkish-English L2 speakers (advanced) will show sensitivity to both collocational and single-word level frequency counts. This hypothesis is based on the result of previous psycholinguistic studies (e.g. Arnon & Cohen Priva, 2015; Wolter & Yasmashita 2018), that

the L1 and proficient L2 speakers attend to both single word and collocational frequency counts simulatanously.

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Part 2: A Corpus Study of Adjective-noun Collocations in Typologically Different