Native compounds in TİD: A classification based on headedness

Abstract

This paper investigates the position of the structural head and its connection to the semantic head in 127 compounds in Turkish Sign Language (TİD). To eliminate language contact effects, we selected compounds that have monomorphemic counterparts in Turkish. The findings are: (i) Endocentric compounds tend to be head-final, (ii) Exocentric compounds tend to be head-initial, (iii) compound internal order, in some well-defined cases, is affected by the lexical semantics of one of the components. In addition, we identify two classes of compounds, cranberry compounds and descriptive compounds, and finally, point to the similarities between compound and phrase structure with respect to the head parameter.

Keywords

• native compounds
• TİD
• headedness