Lexical Innovations In Turkish

Lexical innovations are used when there is no conventional terms for a specific object or event, or when speakers do not remember the conventional term (Clark, 1991). In such cases, children use the options for lexical innovations in the course of acquisition. Three devices are noted for lexical innovations, namely, compounding, derivation, and conversion. Clark and her colleagues (1981, 1982, 1991, 1993, Clark & Hecht 1982, Clark, Hecht & Mulford 1986) propose two main principles for lexical innovations which are simplicity of form and semantic transparency in addition to productivity, conventionality and contrast . This study aims to find the occurrences of lexical innovations in spontaneous speech samples of Turkish speaking children and see if these principles are also valid for Turkish. Aksu-Koc's cross-sectional data on CHILDES corpus in 4-months intervals from 33 children aged between 2;0 and 4;8 was analyzed. Findings were interpreted for different types of innovations, word formation strategies, and lexical innovations over time. The results showed that, first, children produced more innovations in the category of nouns than verbs. Second, three categories emerged in addition to compounding and derivation, which are characteristic expression, substitution, and made-up word category . Lastly, compounding emerged earlier (2;4) than derivation (2;8) in Turkish which was interpreted as a supporting finding for the principles of simplicity of form, and semantic transparency.

Keywords

lexical innovations, simplicity of form, semantic transparency, compounding, derivation