REDUPLICATION PROCESSES IN TURKISH AND GERMAN: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY

Abstract

The main goal of this study is to analyse the reduplicative structures in two languages: Turkish and German. Unlike German, Turkish is known as a language that actively uses productive reduplicative structures. There are different functions of these structures. They can be employed to produce new words in some languages or they can add different meanings to the existing words. They are mostly divided as partial and full reduplication. Also, some of the reduplication processes are productive, which means they can be used with new words unlike unproductive reduplication which can only be used with some specific words in that language. This study is a contrastive study and this requires three steps in the study: description, juxtaposition and comparison (Krzeszowski, 1990: 35). In the description step, the features of reduplication are defined and reduplicative processes in Turkish and German are described. In the second step, juxtaposition, the common ground to be compared in two languages are stated. At the end in the comparison step, the differences and similarities regarding reduplicative processes in two languages are determined related to type and degree. In terms of degree, both languages have full and partial reduplication. On the other hand, German has more types of reduplicative structures compared to Turkish. When two languages are compared regarding type, it is possible to state that German reduplicative structures are mostly unproductive, which means those structures are generally lexicalized or idiomatic expressions and do not allow for new words unlike Turkish.

Keywords

• Reduplication
• Turkish
• German
• Contrastive Analysis

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