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

Abstract

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.

Non-manual Focus Markers in Turkish Sign Language

“…Information structure overall is underinvestigated in TİD; a few studies have reported syntactic and nonmanual strategies as a marker of focus. As for syntactic structures, doubling, cleft, and fronting to the initial position are also reported for TİD (Makaroğlu 2012). Gökgöz & Keleş (2020) report eyebrow raise and eye squint as nonmanual strategies.…”

Lexical Borrowing of Social Media Terms in LIPUTAN6.COM Website

“…An area of linguistics known as word formation analyzes the patterns languages use to create new lexical units or words. Word formation can be accomplished through various methods, such as compounding, affixation, and conversion (Kara & Şahin, 2021).…”