Common and Productive Morphemes in Language Acquisition: A Corpus-Based Study on Children’s Books

Abstract

This study is a corpus study on morphological features of children’s books in Turkish. The purpose of the study is to determine derivational and inflectional suffixes in Turkish children books and to identify the common and productive morphemes used in child literature in the light of the information obtained; hence, reach clues about determining the priorities in the process of vocabulary acquisition in children. To achieve this, different literature examples written for children were examined, a corpus was formed by analyzing the derivational and inflectional suffixes, the frequency of use of categories and sub-categories was determined and a comparison between categories was made. The results yielded that inflectional suffixes were used more frequently than derivational suffixes, which could be due to less frequent use of derivational suffixes than inflectional suffixes. Also, derivational suffixes could be less productive in language acquisition process and therefore acquired late.