Contemporary Studies in Linguistics I

Douglas Q. Adams is an American linguist and Indo-European comparativist, serving as professor emeritus of English at the University of Idaho, where he specialized in historical linguistics with a focus on the lexicon and morphology of Proto-Indo-European and the extinct Tocharian languages. Renowned as one of the world's foremost authorities on Tocharian—a branch of Indo-European discovered in early 20th-century manuscripts from Central Asia—Adams earned his PhD in linguistics from the University of Chicago in 1972 and contributed significantly to the field through philological analysis and etymological studies. His work has been praised for its philological rigor, with reviews highlighting its value for both specialists and general scholars in Indo-European studies.

Dr. Oktay Çınar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Istanbul Medeniyet University. He received his B.A. in English Linguistics from Hacettepe University in 2011 and completed his Ph.D. in English Linguistics at the same institution in 2021.
His doctoral dissertation examined the acquisition of null and overt subjects in L2 Turkish at the syntax–discourse interface. His research focuses on syntax–discourse interface phenomena, null and overt subject pronouns, implicit causality, L2 acquisition of Turkish, and discourse analysis. He has published articles in national and international peer-reviewed journals and books.
Dr. Çınar is a member of the Linguistics Association and has been involved in TÜBİTAK-funded research projects on reference resolution and discourse analysis.

Dr. Fırat Başbuğ is a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at Istanbul Medeniyet University. He received his B.A. from Istanbul University, his M.A. from Belarusian State University (BSU), and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Moscow State University (MSU). From 2010 to 2012, he worked as a research assistant at Nevşehir University. His primary research interests include language documentation, morphology, and haptic elicitation methods. He has conducted fieldwork on languages and varieties such as Chulym, Sakha (Yakut), Telengit (Altai), and Cilician Arabic. His recent work, conducted within the Mumulab, focuses on the systematic integration of physical resistance into language documentation processes through parametrically designed 3D-printed stimuli and the "Haptic Minimal Pair" (HMP) framework. Making contributions to the institutionalization of scientific and cultural activities, Dr. Başbuğ founded the İdil Journal of Art and Language in 2012, which is one of Turkey’s longest-running art journals and will reach its 123rd issue in 2025. He was elected President of the Board of the SADA in 2013, and in 2015, he established Artsürem Science and Art Inc., which has hosted hundreds of cultural and artistic events. Additionally, he served as the president of the International SADA Interdisciplinary Art Symposium between 2018 and 2024.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Hakan Aydemir is a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics at Istanbul Medeniyet University. Specializing in historical linguistics, Altaic linguistics, contact linguistics, and the history of the Turkic languages, Aydemir's research primarily focuses on historical contacts between the Indo-European Tocharian languages and Turkic languages, as well as language shift, bilingualism, and language death. He has also conducted research at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, making significant contributions to both national and international literature on topics such as the Turkification process of the Tocharians and the linguistic origins of the Székelys.

Prof. Dr. Marcel Erdal is an internationally renowned linguist and Turcologist, widely recognized for his foundational contributions to Old Turkic studies and general linguistics. He earned his PhD from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1976 and served as a Professor of Turcology at Goethe University Frankfurt from 1993 to 2010, where he also held prominent administrative roles, including Dean and Director of the Institute for Oriental and East Asian Philologies. As a leading authority in the field, Prof. Erdal has authored seminal works such as A Grammar of Old Turkic (2004) and Old Turkic Word Formation (1991), which remain essential reference texts in Turcology. His profound impact on the discipline is evidenced by his election as an Honorary Member of the Turkish Language Association (TDK) in 2000 and his appointment to the scientific steering committee of the Turfan Studies Project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. Furthermore, he has directed monumental digital humanities initiatives, including the VATEC project (Pre-Islamic Old Turkic Texts Electronic Corpus), bridging classical philology with modern digital documentation.

Zeynep Erdemir graduated from the Department of Linguistics at Boğaziçi University. She is currently pursuing a master’s degree at the same university. She works as a research assistant at Istanbul Medeniyet University. 

Dr. Ümit Atlamaz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Boğaziçi University. He earned his B.A. with High Honors in Foreign Language Education (with a minor in Linguistics) in 2009 and his M.A. in Linguistics in 2012, both from Boğaziçi University. He completed his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Rutgers University in 2019 with a dissertation titled "Agreement, Case, and Nominal Licensing," chaired by Mark C. Baker. Prior to his current academic appointment, he worked as a linguist and analytical linguist at Facebook and Google from 2018 to 2021. His primary research interests encompass morphosyntax (agreement, case, ergativity, differential object marking), semantics, and Natural Language Processing (ontologies, sentiment analysis, natural language inference)

Dr. Ömer Faruk Demirok is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at Boğaziçi University. He currently serves as the Vice-Chair of the department (since 2022) and the Coordinator for Caucasian Languages (since 2021). He earned his B.A. in Foreign Language Education, alongside a Certificate in Linguistics, from Boğaziçi University in 2010, followed by an M.A. in Linguistics from the same institution in 2013. In 2019, he received his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with his dissertation titled "Scope Theory Revisited: Lessons from pied-piping in wh-questions". His primary research interests lie at the intersection of morphosyntax (argument structure, case, agreement) and formal semantics (scope, intensionality, wh-semantics). His work focuses extensively on Turkish, South Caucasian languages, and endangered languages.

Dr. Ruhan Güçlü is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Gaziantep University, where she has also been serving as the Vice Chair since 2025. She completed her entire higher education—earning her B.A. (2011), M.A. (2015), and Ph.D. (2022)—in the Department of English Linguistics at Hacettepe University. Her academic career began as a research assistant at Hacettepe University (2014–2022), followed by a brief tenure at Adıyaman University (2022–2023), before joining the faculty at Gaziantep University in 2023. Additionally, she served as a visiting scholar at the University of Prishtina in Kosovo in 2024. Dr. Güçlü’s primary research interests lie at the intersection of discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics. Her research predominantly focuses on metadiscourse strategies in academic texts, authorial stance (hedging and boosting), gender-based differences in language use, and word associations. Her recent work extends this discursive and stylistic analytical framework to the examination of AI-generated texts (e.g., ChatGPT) and the representation of values and emotions in children's literature.

Ali Çağan Kaya is a high-honors undergraduate researcher in the Department of English Linguistics at Hacettepe University. His primary research interests encompass experimental phonetics (acoustic phonetics), psycholinguistics, and computational tool development. His research focuses specifically on Turkish vowel formants, employing experimental methods such as eye-tracking and pupillometry. He served as a research intern at the Ankara University Brain Research Center (AU-BRC), where he acquired proficiency in complex data modeling utilizing computational tools and environments like Praat, R (LMM, GAMM), and Python. He is currently executing a project titled "The Vowel Frequencies of Standard Turkish," funded by the TÜBİTAK 2209-A program. To provide methodological contributions to the literature, he has developed open-source software, including "VowSpace" (a vowel formant analysis and normalization tool) and the AI-powered "Praanscribe" (a semi-automatic segmentation tool for Praat). Furthermore, he is the co-author of a meta-analytical chapter on Turkish vowel formants in the volume Contemporary Studies in Linguistics I. Alongside his experimental research, he also serves as the President of the Hacettepe University Linguistics Community.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emre Yağlı is a faculty member in the Department of English Linguistics at Hacettepe University. He received his B.A. (2009), M.A. (2012), and Ph.D. (2018) degrees from Hacettepe University.His doctoral research focused on sociophonetic variables and listener perceptions in Turkish. His research interests include sociolinguistics, the interface between phonetics/phonology and sociolinguistics, language ideologies, and discourse analysis. He has published widely in national and international peer-reviewed journals and has contributed book chapters on language variation and social meaning.

Prof. Dr. Mehmet Akif Kılıç, Kulak Burun Boğaz (KBB) ve İletişim Bozuklukları alanında profesör olarak görev yapmaktadır. Disiplinlerarası bir araştırmacı olan Dr. Kılıç’ın temel uzmanlık alanları; otolarengoloji, fonyatri (ses hastalıkları), dil ve konuşma patolojisi, odyoloji ve akustik sesbilgisidir (fonetik). Araştırmaları, ses patolojilerinin teşhisi ve sesin akustik analizi üzerine yoğunlaşmaktadır. Özellikle "Ses Handikap Endeksi'nin (Voice Handicap Index) Türkçe Versiyonunun Geçerliliği ve Güvenilirliği" (2008) üzerine yaptığı çalışmalar, Türkiye'deki klinik ses değerlendirmelerinde bir standart oluşturmuştur. Klinik KBB çalışmalarının yanı sıra Türkçenin sesbilgisi üzerine de temel araştırmalar yürütmüş; Türkçedeki patlamalı ünsüzlerin (stop consonants) ötümlenme başlama süreleri (VOT), dar yuvarlak olmayan ünlünün (/ı/) merkez/arka konumu ve 'yumuşak g' (ğ) ünsüzünün akustik analizi gibi konularda uluslararası ve ulusal literatüre referans niteliğinde yayınlar kazandırmıştır. Praat ve MDVP gibi akustik analiz yazılımlarının karşılaştırmalı metodolojik incelemelerini de gerçekleştiren Prof. Dr. Kılıç’ın çalışmaları, klinik tıp ile teorik/uygulamalı dilbilim arasında güçlü bir köprü kurmaktadır. 

Prof. Dr. Michael Knüppel is a researcher and faculty member at the Arctic Studies Center (ASC) at Liaocheng University in China. Having previously been affiliated with the Department of Turkology and Central Asian Studies at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Dr. Knüppel also serves on the authorized representative board of the Societas Uralo-Altaica (SUA), e.V. His primary research interests encompass Turkology, Altaic Studies, Paleosiberian languages (e.g., Yukaghir, Yeniseian), Tungusic languages, the sociolinguistic study of Chinese Muslims (Hui, Dungan), and the history of Oriental and Turkic studies. He has conducted in-depth archival research on the bio-bibliographies and correspondences of foundational scholars in the field, such as Ármin Vámbéry, Zeki Velidi Togan, Willi Bang-Kaup, and Friedrich Carl Andreas. His research covers a wide spectrum, ranging from the philological analysis of Old Turkic healing and ritual texts (within the VOHD series) to language taboos and fable translations in Altaic and Paleosiberian languages. His work is widely published in established journals, including Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, Folia Orientalia, Fabula, and Acta Orientalia.

Hülya Kocagül is a lecturer (PhD) in the Department of Linguistics at Istanbul Medeniyet University, Turkey. She received her PhD in Forensic Linguistics from Aston University (UK). Her research focuses on forensic authorship analysis, stylistic analysis, authorship attribution, and deception linguistics, with a particular emphasis on Turkish-language contexts. She is the author of Authorship Attribution in Turkish Texts and her current research interests include authorship analysis in Turkish texts, the impact of AI-generated content on forensic authorship concepts, and threat language analysis in digital communication.

Dr. Nurbanu Korkmaz is a faculty member at Ağrı İbrahim Çeçen University. Having completed her graduate studies and served as a research assistant in the Department of English Linguistics at Hacettepe University, Dr. Korkmaz’s primary research interests revolve around cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics (speech production and comprehension), and pragmatics. Her research focuses on the complex interplay between language and cognition. Most notably, within the framework of figurative language comprehension, her empirical studies on how young adults with Down Syndrome process Turkish idioms shed light on the semantic processing mechanisms of neurocognitively atypical populations. Furthermore, she conducts research on the metaphor-based conceptualization of "science and scientists" within the scope of Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory, alongside sociolinguistic investigations into compliment responses in Turkish across variables of academic status and gender. Ultimately, Dr. Korkmaz's work provides valuable insights into the cognitive constraints of language and how these constraints manifest in socio-pragmatic environments.

Assoc. Prof. Dr. Emel Kökpınar Kaya is a faculty member in the Department of English Linguistics at Hacettepe University, Faculty of Letters. She received her B.A. from the Department of Foreign Language Education at Middle East Technical University (2002), and completed her M.A. (2006) and Ph.D. (2014) in English Linguistics at Hacettepe University. Her doctoral research focused on conversational narratives in Turkish. Her research interests include discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, narrative analysis, media discourse, and the linguistic construction of social meaning. She has published widely in national and international peer-reviewed journals and has authored and co-authored books and book chapters. Her work particularly addresses media discourse, othering, identity construction, and political discourse. She continues her academic career at Hacettepe University and has taken part in TÜBİTAK-funded and university-supported research projects as both principal investigator and researcher.

Tai Ma is a syntactician currently pursuing graduate research in the Department of Linguistics at Carleton University in Canada. His primary research lies at the interfaces of syntax with morphology and semantics, situated within the framework of Generative Grammar. By integrating approaches from Distributed Morphology (DM) and the Minimalist Program (MP), he theoretically challenges the Lexicon Hypothesis.

Having completed his earlier undergraduate and graduate studies at Marmara University, his research predominantly focuses on the morphosyntactic structure of Turkish. He investigates topics such as the nominal morphology of subordinate clauses formed with -DIk, -AcAk, and -mA, the status of wh-words in complement clauses, noun phrases, and modality from a generative perspective.

Dr. Engin Evrim Önem is a Lecturer at the School of Foreign Languages at Erciyes University. He received his B.A. from Erciyes University (2001) and completed his M.A. in Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) at Bilkent University (2015). He holds two distinct Ph.D. degrees: one in Linguistics from Ankara University (2011) and another in English Linguistics from Hacettepe University (2022). He also served as a visiting researcher at the Department of Linguistics at the University of Connecticut (2008–2009) under the Fulbright scholarship program. His primary research interests encompass experimental linguistics, psycholinguistics, Turkish syntax (specifically scrambling), and applied linguistics. He has published extensively on both anxiety and assessment in language learning, as well as on the cognitive processing of Turkish, utilizing self-paced reading paradigms via PsychoPy. In recent years, his research agenda has expanded to explore the linguistic limitations and processing constraints of artificial intelligence systems.

He was born in 1989 in Vorkuta. In 2011, graduated from the he Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (Department of Germanic and Celtic Philology). In 2014, he completed postgraduate studies of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2016-2019, he worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History (Jena, Germany). Since 2020, he has been working as a Researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Research interests: comparative-historical linguistics, areal linguistics, field linguistics, interdisciplinary studies of ethno-linguistic history, Chuvash, Turkic, Altai languages, Mari languages, Permic languages, Uralic languages, Volga-Kama languages. Fieldwork: Chuvash (2011-2015, five expeditions in Chuvashia and Tatarstan), Beserman dialect of Udmurt (2011, Udmurtia), Mishar dialect of Tatar (2015, Nizhny Novgorod Region), Middle Chulym (2015, Tomsk Region and Krasnoyarsk Territory), Hill Mari (2016, Mari El). Member of the editorial board of the journal "Russian Turkology".

Yuriy M. Svoyskiy is an expert archaeologist whose work primarily focuses on archaeological sites, cave art, and epigraphic monuments in Russia, the Southern Urals, and the Eurasian steppes. His research agenda is centered on the documentation and analysis of Paleolithic art in sites of prehistoric significance, most notably the Shulgan-Tash (Kapova) Cave. Furthermore, he is noted for his ecological and bio-archaeological investigations into aquatic protist (single-celled microorganism) communities within these archaeological environments. Svoyskiy is widely recognized for his interdisciplinary approach that integrates archaeological data with the natural sciences, his extensive fieldwork, and his scholarly contributions to the literature.

Mürselin Taşan is a Research Assistant in the English Language Teaching (ELT) Program at the Faculty of Education, Istanbul Medipol University. Taşan completed undergraduate studies in the ELT Department at Kocaeli University and subsequently earned a Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in English Language Education from Bahçeşehir University, graduating as the valedictorian of the department. Currently, Taşan is pursuing a Ph.D. in the same field at Bahçeşehir University. Holding an internationally recognized CELTA certification, Taşan has served as an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) instructor in California. Throughout their academic career, Taşan has acquired six years of experience teaching English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) at the tertiary level, instructing multinational student cohorts from diverse disciplinary backgrounds. Currently focusing on doctoral dissertation research and various academic projects, Taşan’s primary research interests lie at the intersection of EAP/ESP, Cognitive Science, Learning Environments, and Positive Psychology.

Dr. Abdullah Topraksoy is a faculty member in the Department of Linguistics, Division of Applied Linguistics, at the Faculty of Letters, Istanbul University. He received his B.A. in English Linguistics (2012), his M.A. in General Linguistics (2015), and his Ph.D. in English Linguistics (2022) from Hacettepe University. Dr. Topraksoy's primary research interests lie at the intersection of applied linguistics, morphology, syntax, and visual-spatial languages. During his master's studies, he focused on Turkish Sign Language (TİD), examining the linguistic system of "Personal Name Signs." In his doctoral research, he shifted toward the more formal and abstract domains of grammar, defending his dissertation titled "Motion Predicates in Turkish: A Morpho-Syntactic Treatment". The researcher produces work across a broad theoretical spectrum, ranging from the sociolinguistic dimensions of visual languages to the syntactic formulation of motion verbs.

Prof. Dr. Murat Özgen, born in İzmir in 1986, completed his primary and secondary education in İzmir before receiving his B.A. in English Linguistics from Hacettepe University. After graduating in 2008, he completed his M.A. at Dokuz Eylül University in 2010 and continued with his doctoral studies. He earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from Ankara University in 2015.

Between August 2017 and February 2018, he conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for six months. Since 2012, Özgen has been serving at the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Letters, Dokuz Eylül University. His research interests include syntax, formal grammars, and formal semantics.

Dr. Serkan Uygun is a faculty member at Bahçeşehir University. He completed his undergraduate studies in the English Language Teaching (ELT) department at Istanbul University in 2000, and earned his master's (2010) and doctoral (2016) degrees in the English Language Education program at Yeditepe University. In the subsequent stages of his academic career, he served as a postdoctoral researcher on a project funded by the DFG (German Research Foundation) in Germany (2018–2021). Dr. Uygun’s primary research interests revolve around psycholinguistics, bilingualism, Turkish as a heritage language, and morphological processing. He is particularly recognized for his experimental studies investigating how Turkish heritage speakers in Germany process and model semantic (e.g., definiteness) and morphological (e.g., subject-verb agreement, aorist generalizations) features. His research has been published in prestigious international journals such as Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, Second Language Research, and Frontiers in Psychology. Currently, he serves as the principal investigator for a psycholinguistic project funded by the TÜBİTAK 3501 program, which examines morphological processing in L1 and L2 speakers.