A LEXICAL COMPARISON OF ENGLISH AND TURKISH CORPORA

Lexicon is one of the most important components of languages. Therefore, when it comes to learning a second/foreign language, vocabulary of the target language appears as the first most important obstacle that should be dealt with. Most of the time, foreign/second language learners have to face the challenge of expressing concepts that are very frequent in their own language but non-existent in the target language, or vice-versa. This study tries to deal with the differences between the English and Turkish languages in terms of the most frequent words. To this end, two corpora were chosen: Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and Turkish Spoken Corpus. The two corpora were compared in terms of the most frequent 2000 words. The results, so far, have indicated that although there is an extensive overlap between the most frequent words in both languages, some important mismatches are available and the results are still being analyzed.