Turkish electronic living lexicon (TELL): a lexical database

Abstract

The purpose of the TELL project is to create a database of Turkish lexical items which reflects actual speaker knowledge, rather than the normative and phonologically incomplete dictionary representations on which most of the existing phonological literature on Turkish is based. The database, accessible over the internet, should greatly enhance phonological, morphological, and lexical research on the language. The current version of TELL consists of some 15,000 headwords from the 2nd and 3rd editions of the Oxford Turkish-English Dictionary, orthographically represented; proper names, including 175 place names from a guide of Istanbul and 5,000 place names from a telephone area code directory of Turkey; phonemic transcriptions of the pronunciations of the same headwords and place names embedded in various morphological contexts, with suffixed forms eliciting morphophonemic alternations; etymological information gathered from a variety of etymological sources; and roots for a number of morphologically complex headwords. The paper describes the construction and current structure of the TELL database, identifies potential research questions that could be addressed through its use, and outlines the goals for the next phase of the project.