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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.22210/suvlin.2026.101.01

Verbal Forms in Turkish Television Series: Corpus Analysis as a Resource for Research on Incidental Language Acquisition

Marta Andrić orcid.org/0000-0002-1924-4756 ; Filozofski fakultet, Sveučilište u Zagrebu *
Tatjana Podvezanec

* Dopisni autor.

Sažetak

The aim of this paper was to document, and at least partially describe, the trend of acquiring Turkish
through television series in Croatia – a phenomenon present since 2010, when a Turkish series was
first broadcast on a domestic television channel. Since then, the consumption of Turkish series, further
encouraged by the online availability of content, has become a stable and remarkably dynamic form of
contact between Croatian viewers and the Turkish language.
This study examines the distribution of verbal forms in the first five episodes of the Turkish television
series Yabani in order to assess the extent to which viewers may spontaneously acquire elements of the
Turkish language through watching series. The corpus, consisting of 32,253 words, was processed using
Sketch Engine, with necessary manual corrections due to the limited accuracy of existing morphological
annotation tools for Turkish. A comparison withA Frequency Dictionary of Turkishshowed that approximately
50 % of the most frequent lemmas overlap with the language of the series, while the overlap for the most
frequent verbs reaches 74 %.
The corpus analysis extracted all verbal forms, calculated their frequencies, and established their relative
proportions and distributions across categories. The most frequent forms in the corpus are the present of
imek ‘to be’, the imperative, and the –DI perfect, while infinitival forms and complex tenses are considerably
rarer. The analysis further indicates that singular forms predominate: first– and second–person forms due
to the dialogic nature of the text, and third–person forms owing to the narrative passages.
The questionnaire conducted with viewers of Turkish series (N = 15) shows that participants most
successfully recognise finite forms such as the present tense and the imperative, whereas recognition of
non–finite and more complex forms is markedly lower. These results confirm the initial assumption that
basic finite verbal structures are the most readily acquired through exposure to series.

Ključne riječi

Turkish language; television series; corpus analysis; verbal forms; incidental language acquisition

Hrčak ID:

349600

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/349600

Datum izdavanja:

21.7.2026.

Podaci na drugim jezicima: hrvatski

Posjeta: 0 *