Cranberry Morphemes in Turkish

Abstract

In this paper we deal with cranberry morphemes in Turkish, which are meaningless and bound. First, we discuss the accuracy of the term "unique", which is frequently used to describe cranberry morphemes, and we assert that they are not unique, but rather can be found in lexical items reflecting multiple types of derivation. We revisit colak's recent work on so-called "fossilized words" (2015), where she examines 212 cranberry morphemes in Turkish found in all kinds of idiomatic constructions by tracking their diachronic development within the Turkish National Corpus. Diverging from colak, we claim that cranberry morphemes can also be found in derived words with meaningful suffixes. They can also be extracted from some verb doublets reflecting voice oppositions. To facilitate further research on cranberry morphemes we propose eight criteria for determining cranberry morphemes in Turkish. We also discuss a gray area involving verbs where it is problematic to postulate cranberry morphemes and conclude that they should not be considered cranberry morphemes. Our entire (but not exhaustive) list of cranberry morphemes in Turkish (including Colak's findings) are presented in seven appendices demonstrating different patterns and categories.