Nonce formations in Turkish

Nonce formations are lexemes in a language which have been encountered at least once in a given environment but have not been adopted by the speakers. Nonce formations suggest significant clues as to the morphological tendency of derivation of a language during the process of a word from the possible word to the actual word. Our study is based on the assumption that the existing lexemes in the lexicon also determine the morphological features of nonce formations, and aims to reveal the word formation methods observed in nonce formations in Turkish, derivational morphemes, the parallelism of these derivational features to the general tendency of Turkish, and to determine the derivational characteristics of the lexemes entering the institutionalization process, and the lexicalization process of those nonce formations. To this end, first, the research defined the nonce formation in detail referring to the relevant literature where necessary, and discussed the criteria determining the nonce formations as well as the lexicalization process. Nonce formations were determined by examining the cartoons in 264 humor magazines and by examining the lexicalization and institutionalization of the candidate structures. Lexemes which were found out to be in the second step of lexicalization, to say the institutionalization process, were examined under three basic groups as first, middle and last institutionalized words. In line with our research questions, the most productive ways of word derivation were found out as affixation, compounding and onomatopoeia. The least productive processes in Turkish nonce formations were generalization, retronym and backformation. Suppletion, fusion and conversion were not observed. The most derivational morphemes in nonce formations were {-lIk}, {-CI}, {-lI}. No significant correlation was found between the frequency of productivity and the degree of institutionalization. Last but not least, the research listed word formation methods and derivational morphemes on the basis of their productivity, and discussed these findings within the framework of previous literature. Keywords: Nonce Formation, Productivity, Word Formation Methods, Derivational Morpheme, Institutionalization, Lexicalization