Türetme

Türetme is a Turkish term meaning the act of generating or producing new forms. In linguistics, türetme describes the processes by which words are formed from existing bases, typically through affixation, nominalization, or compounding. The concept relies on the Turkish language’s agglutinative structure, where suffixes attach to stems to create new lexemes and grammatical forms.

As a broad category, türetme encompasses derivational morphology and other word-formation pathways that yield new words or grammatical categories. Turkish uses a variety of derivational suffixes to create nouns, adjectives, and verbs from existing bases, enabling a wide range of semantic shifts without altering the root word.

Examples of türetme include: yaz (to write) becoming yazı (writing, text) through nominalization with the suffix -ı; güzel (beautiful) becoming güzellik (beauty) via the suffix -lik; and kitap (book) becoming kitaplık (bookcase, library) through -lık. These illustrate how affixation alters meaning and word class, a hallmark of Turkish word formation.

Beyond derivation, türetme also covers compounding and other productive word-formation processes that expand the Turkish lexicon. In practice, the term is used in linguistics, education, and computational linguistics to analyze and sometimes automate word generation.

Etymology: türetme derives from türetmek, meaning to generate or produce, with the noun-forming suffix -me. In some sources, türetim is used for the act of derivation, while türetme emphasizes the producing aspect.

See also: Turkish morphology, derivation, agglutination.