The linguistic analysis of Turkish novels’ Blurbs: A genre based study

Abstract

The purpose of this paper was to make a linguistic analysis of the specifically chosen Turkish novels’ blurbs. This study focused on the blurbs of 10 novels in different genres involving Psychology, Sufism, Tragedy, Biography, History, Literary, Thriller & Adventure, Self-Improvement, Romance and Horror. In terms of communicative purpose and linguistic analysis of rhetorical and lexico-grammatical choices, the methodologies of Selinker (1972,), Lackstrom (1973), Trimble (1974), Swales (1990) and Bhatia (1993) and consequently their connection with the advertising discourse were applied to the corpus consisting of 10 Turkish novels’ blurbs. In the first stage, for delimiting the scope of the study, domain-specific corpus was determined. Next, the study was devoted to exploring the rhetorical structure of blurbs from a genre analysis perspective (Swales, 1990; Bathia, 1993) to identify their communicative purpose. Furthermore, linguistics analysis in regard to lexico-grammatical features and the relation between the form of linguistic resources and the functional aspects they textualize in discourse were focused. The results showed that book blurbs formed a specific genre characterized by a certain communicative purpose. In the lights of the findings, it was found that the use of specific linguistic and discursive conventions demonstrated some basic characteristics of advertising discourse.

Keywords

• Genre Analysis,Book Blurbs,Lexico-Grammatical Linguistic Features,Communicative Purpose,Advertising Discourse

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