Contextualized teaching of polysemous verbs in Turkish as a foreign language

Polysemy is a phenomenon that is closely related to context. Words show distributional differences in their different senses. This is apparent, in particular, in verbs, as verbs can have different valence structures in their different senses. Differences in valence structure can be seen in the number, grammatical function, semantic role and semantic properties of the obligatory and optional arguments that verbs can take. In relation to foreign language vocabulary teaching and polysemy, context is important because learning different senses and usages of words can only be achieved through encountering words in different contexts. The aim of this thesis is to create sentence contexts for different senses of verbs with respect to their differences in valence structure for the purpose of contextualized teaching of senses of polysemous verbs in Turkish as a foreign language. Verbs that are highly frequent and have the most number of senses in Turkish were selected for this study; al-, gel-, çık-, çalış-, geç-, kal-, aç-, dur-, bırak-. First, valence properties of the verbs in their different senses were analyzed and differences in valence structure were determined among senses. Then, sentence contexts were created with respect to the valence structure that these verbs have in their different senses for the purpose of contextualized teaching of verb senses.