TÜRKÇE KELİMENİN UZUNLUĞU ÜZERİNE
ABOUT THE LENGTH OF TURKISH WORDS

Summary/Abstract: Irregularity of components is a basic property of a language as a multivariate phenomenon. In the process of speech various linguistic levels – phonological, morphonological, morphological, morphosintactical and syntactical – display certain limitations associated with the combinability of morpheme sequences, combined nouns, the structure of phrases or sentences, etc. On the basis of a series of psycholinguistic experiments it has been established that in the process of speech generation recording of different levels of units is performed not in the constants, but in the so called immediate memory. Its volume is limited to the 7±2 symbols of a message. We can illustrate this in the case of Turkish word-form : Ev-ler-im-de-ki-ler-den-di-n ‘You was of those who had been in my houses’ The morpheme sequence will remain correct if some affixes are included: ev-ler-im-iz-de-ki-ler-den-di-yse-n-iz ‘If you were (one) of those who had been in our houses’ Or else: Kes-tir-il-ebil-ecek-mi-ymiş-sin-iz ‘ Could you have been cut off ? ’ A native speaker can easily understand such awkward morpheme constructions, but in natural speech and written texts which had been reviewed with this aim in view no examples were found. It should be noted that short constructions are particularly typical for colloquial speech, while the style of scientific papers, which implies a comprehensive description of concepts under study, gives rise to long wordforms.

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