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Presenter

  Yasemin Yildiz
 Yeditepe University 
Turkey

Title
A Linguistic Insight into Made-Up Words 

                                                        
Abstract
Made-up words can occur in a variety of populations -including monolinguals and bilinguals- and have been studied for several reasons; such as to understand the linguistic processes of language development, or to shed light on language interference and change. This study will focus on the latter issue. Where languages are in contact, especially in bilingual speech communities, certain kinds of linguistic phenomena such as borrowing and interference will generally be found.  

It is a common assumption that, in addition to multilingual societies, bilingual populations are also likely to exist in contexts where English is a second language (esl), rather than a foreign language (efl). This study questions whether an efl context can also lead to bilingualism and suggests that one plausible way of testing this supposition is by examining made-up words. The evidence for this is provided from a large group of Turkish university students, where their medium of education is in English, and they are in an efl context.

A close examination of English-Turkish made-up words will, I hope, provide an answer to the following intriguing research questions: What kind of word-formation skills do Turkish speakers possess and does this correlate with their English proficiency? To what extent do made-up words reflect one’s linguistic skills? How and to what extent does English and Turkish influence each other? This in return will not only provide a tentative prediction about the future usage of English in Turkey and guide language teaching, but also question the current status of the efl-esl dichotomy.