Productivity in Turkish: A synchronous evaluation

This study examined the morphological productivity processes in Turkish. The purposee of this work was to illustrate these processes through a corpus formed on the basis of the synchroneity principle which has given various numerical data on the given subject, and to have an opportunity to make a detailed evaluation on the productivity in Turkish by applying similar procedures that were used for Western languages. With this study, generally accepted assumptions on the productivity of Turkish were questioned and, for the first time, this subject was studied by using a corpus consisted of literary works. To realize these purposes, thirhteen suffixes, accepted as productive and non-productive in Turkish, were chosen and the frequency of the words with these suffixes was investigated on the corpus. In the light of datas acquired from this corpus, the productivity of chosen suffixes were evaluated within the framework of frequency models and probabilistic models. The result of these evaluations has shown that the comments made by the traditional studies on productivity can be measured by modern measurement models. On the basis of numerical data, this thesis has reached the same conclusion with the traditional grammatical studies on productive and non-productive suffixes.