Colligational Patterns of Turkish Multi-Word Units
Aksan, Yeşim; Mersin University, Mersinli, Ümit; Mersin University, Altunay, Serap; Mersin University · DergiPark (Istanbul University) · 2016
In multi-word unit (MWU) extraction studies, most of the challenges for richmorphology languages like Turkish can be overcome by the study of howcolligational filtering works in our minds, along with how statistical andcollocational sorting affects the process. Based on the assumption that lexicalizationof any given collocation as a MWU also requires compatibility to some lexicalor morphosyntactic constraints, this study will present the morphosyntactictendencies observed in colligational patterns of Turkish MWUs and discuss theirimplications on language-specific MWU filtering processes. The aim of the studyis to discuss if in Turkish, associative strength is enough for a collocationto be lexicalized as a MWU or not. Another purpose of the study is to show somemorphosyntactic and lexical constraints that may validate collocations to belexical multi-word units in Turkish. The paper will also underscore themethodological perspectives of MWU identification valid for rich-morphologylanguages. To achieve these goals, we first extracted MWU candidates -trigrams- from a 10-million-word sub-corpus ofTurkish National Corpus (TNC) by using Text-NSP (Banerjee & Pederson,2011). After that, the 3-grams were annotated by using the NLP dictionary ofTNC-tagger, and classified according to their colligational patterns andlexical categories of the MWU. Most frequently observed colligational patternsare argued to be morphosyntactic tendencies governing MWU lexicalization inTurkish. In this respect, the study aims to contribute to the understudied areaof formulaic language in Turkish.