Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
21st International Conference on Turkish Linguistics, Mainz, Almanya, 2 - 04 Ağustos 2023, (Yayınlanmadı)
The present study investigates the interactional functions of the discourse particle (DP) ‘Allah’, and its various forms in Turkish spoken discourse. Accordingly, it seeks answers for three research questions: (1) What different forms does ‘Allah’ have as an interactional DP? (2) What are the interactional functions of ‘Allah’ and its other forms? (3) In what domains (e.g., family and friends, workplace) does ‘Allah’ occur as an interactional DP? In order to answer these questions, Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC) is utilized, and corpus-based discourse analysis was conducted. STC is a general multi-modal corpus of spoken Turkish which has 291.923 tokens and provides rich metadata. To analyze the interactional functions of ‘Allah’ via STC, after running the search query ‘Allah’, the concordance lines were scrutinized so that only the ones functioning as interactional DPs are included. In the end, 140 occurrences of ‘Allah’ were investigated in terms of their form and interactional function in conversations in different domains in STC via EXMARaLDA EXACT 1.3.1. and the intonation, via PARTITUR tool. The findings revealed three forms of ‘Allah’ as an interactional DP: the reduplicated ‘Allah’(i.e., Allah Allah), the inflected ‘Allah’ (i.e., ‘Allahım’) and the single ‘Allah’. They also tended to co-occur with other interjections, lexical items, and non-verbal elements. The data yielded eight functions of these forms; however, expressing surprise and disagreement, and intensifying were the most frequent functions. Finally, they were used in all nine domains of STC; nevertheless, they most frequently occurred in conversations among family-relatives and family-friends, and in workplace. The current study can fill the gap in the literature in terms of Turkish linguistics and spoken discourse and encourage further corpus-based analyses of other discoursal elements. The results might also help describing Turkish spoken language in use from which teaching Turkish as a foreign language field might benefit.