A Lexicological Approach to Look-up Frequency of Turkish Sign Language Dictionary Users

Abstract

From a lexicography perspective, the phenomenon of dictionary lookup frequencies can answer many critical questions on the dictionary users' needs and the relationship between corpus data and look-up tendencies. Although numerous studies have been carried out on the theoretical and functional aspects of look-up frequencies in the field of spoken language to date, there are relatively a few attempts to describe the characteristics of look-up behaviors in sign languages. This paper investigates the relationship between the objective frequency list of the Turkish Sign Language Corpus (Makaroğlu, 2021) and The Contemporary Turkish Sign Language Dictionary (Makaroğlu & Dikyuva, 2017) look-up occurrences. Using an approach to compare corpus data and log files, the results demonstrate that there are very limited similarities between the two and that there is no positive relationship for the percentage of the highest ranked items. In addition, the current study concludes that the corpus-based objective frequency list is a comparatively poor predictor of the dictionary look-up frequency and this difference could be direct result of the morphological structure of the words/signs in TİD (rather simultaneous realization) compared to Turkish (rather agglutinative morphology).