The Syntax Distance of Turkish and Its Applied Aspects

This book offers a comprehensive examination of the syntactic structures of Turkish across its historical periods, from Old Turkish to Chagatai Turkish. Moving beyond traditional descriptive approaches, it applies dependency grammar and quantitative methods to reveal structural variation and diachronic change. Drawing on carefully prepared corpora representing seven key stages of Turkish, the analysis addresses measures such as syntactic distance, nucleus-actant relations, bridge-node ratios, and structural centrality. Through computational models and natural language processing tools, it provides a systematic profile of how Turkish sentence structures have evolved over time. This perspective highlights not only formal and functional aspects but also the communicative and narrative needs that shaped expression in different periods. The book sheds light on the formal and functional dimensions of Turkish syntax and builds a bridge between theoretical linguistics and the digital humanities. By introducing the GSM-4 model, it offers a reproducible framework for measuring syntactic complexity in historical texts. In this respect, the volume serves as an important resource not only for Turkologists and historical linguists but also for researchers in computational linguistics, language typology, and cognitive linguistics.

Cemile Uzun, PhD, is a lecturer at F-rat University, Türkiye, where she also completed her BA, MA, and PhD degrees. Her doctoral dissertation focused on "O>U and U>O Sound Change in the Dialects of Turkish in Turkey". Her research interests include foreign language teaching, lexicography, phonetics, morphology, artificial intelligence, and language technologies. She has published studies on vocabulary acquisition, readability, and AI-human text comparison, and actively contributes to international projects on digital linguistics.

Preface Chapter 1. Introduction Chapter 2. Dependency Grammar: Theoretical Foundations Chapter 3. Methodology Chapter 4. Findings Chapter 5. Conclusion Chapter 6. GSM-4 model Proposal Index