I am honoured to have received the Institute for Corpus Research Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Award. The purpose of this annual award is to recognise and reward theses in the field of Corpus Linguistics.

I conducted my PhD research in the Centre for Corpus Approaches to Social Science at Lancaster University, which is part of Department of Linguistics and English Language. My thesis was titled Collocational Processing in Typologically Different Languages, English and Turkish: Evidence from Corpora and Psycholinguistic Experimentation. Some of the findings based on my PhD research are reported in this article. The study was multidisciplinary, involving both corpus analysis and psycholinguistic experimentation. Supervisors Dr Vaclav Brezina and Prof Patrick Rebuschat played a key role in shaping the thesis. Their academic knowledge and insight have been invaluable in developing a multidisciplinary perspective to pioneer a contrastive study of English and Turkish.

Turkish, with its rich morphology, differs from English – prompting questions about whether the same variables affect collocational processing in the two languages. Importantly, so far the vast majority of research on collocational processing has focussed on a narrow range of primarily European languages, especially English, which makes it difficult to generalise the findings to other languages. Corpus analyses showed that uninflected collocations have similar mean frequencies and association counts in both languages. When inflected forms were included, 75% of the Turkish collocations occurred at a higher frequency than the collocations in English, suggesting that language typology impacts frequency of collocations.

I then conducted psycholinguistic experiments to understand the differences and similarities between the processing of collocations in English and Turkish and by native and non-native English speakers. To what extent is there a difference between native-speakers’ (of English and Turkish) sensitivity to both individual word-level and phrase level frequency information when processing collocations? Mixed-effects regression modelling revealed that Turkish and English native-speakers are equally sensitive to collocation frequencies, confirming collocations’ psychological reality in both languages. Yet English speakers were additionally affected by individual word-frequencies, indicating that language typologies require users to process collocations from different sources of information.

Furthermore, this thesis investigated the effects of individual word and collocational frequency on native and non-native speakers’ collocational processing in English. Both groups of participants demonstrated sensitivity to individual word and collocation frequency. The findings align with the predictions of usage-based approaches that language acquisition should be viewed as a statistical accumulation of experiences that changes every time we encounter a particular utterance.

This study identified both universal fundamentals and language-specific differences in collocational processing. It addressed language typology and second-language learning through a novel multidisciplinary approach which reinforces and challenges usage-based theories of language learning, demonstrating that they should include typologically different languages to develop broader perspectives on processing.

Please see the link here for more information about this award.

If you have any questions, or are interested in working with me, get in touch. Dr Doğuş Can Öksüz Research fellow at the University of Leeds. d.oksuz@leeds.ac.uk