Turkish Electronic Living Lexicon (TELL): A Lexical Database

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 the following components: • Some 15,000 headwords from the 2d and 3d 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. (Eliciting suffixed forms along with stems exposes any morphophonemic alternations that the headwords in question are subject to.) • Etymological information, garnered from a variety of etymological sources. • Roots for a number of morphologically complex headwords. The paper describes the construction of the current structure of the TELL database, points out potential questions that could be addressed by putting the database into use, and specifies goals for the next phase of the project.