A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of Dedikodu and Gıybet in Turkish

Year 2022, Volume: 8 Issue: 2, 249 - 272, 27.10.2022

Kadriye Aytaç Demirçivi

https://doi.org/10.31464/jlere.1080512

Abstract

This study compares the frequency, connotations and collocations of the words dedikodu and gıybet in Turkish. Turkish National Corpus and Spoken Turkish Corpus were utilized as the data source. Frequency analysis reveals that dedikodu is more frequently used compared to gıybet and several formulaic expressions were observed for dedikodu. With regards to the domains, gıybet is only used in written discourse and mostly in religious sources whereas dedikodu was observed in a variety of domains including prose, biography, scientific and non-scientific sources. Based on the discourse analysis that was carried out by a meticulous analysis and coding of the contexts of each occurrence, remarkable connotational differences were found out between dedikodu and gıybet. These words were also analysed with reference to their semantic prosody by an examination of their collocations. Collocational analysis unveils that gıybet always co-occurs with negative words. Although mostly negative, dedikodu is collocated with both positive and negative words.

Keywords

dedikodu, gıybet, semantic prosody, corpus analysis

References

• Aksan, Y. et al. (2012). Construction of the Turkish National Corpus (TNC). In Proceedings of the Eight International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012). İstanbul. Turkiye. http://www.lrecconf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/papers.html.
• Barnbrook, G, Mason, O. & Krishnamurthy, R. (2013). Collocation. Applications and implications. Palgrave Macmillan.
• Foucault, M. (1972). The archaeology of knowledge. London:Routledge.
• Hunston, S. (2002). Corpora in applied linguistics. Cambridge University Press.
• Hunston, S. (2007). Semantic prosody revisited. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 12(2), 249-268. DOI: 10.1075/ijcl.12.2.
• Leech, G. (2007). New resources, or just better old ones? The Holy Grail of representativeness. In M. Hundt, N. Nesselhauf & C. Biewer (Eds.). Corpus Linguistics and the Web (pp. 133-149). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
• Louw, B. (1993). Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? In M. Baker et al. (Eds), Text and technology (pp. 157-176). John Benjamins.
• McEnery, T., & Hardie, A. (2011). Corpus linguistics: method, theory, and practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Partington, A. (1998). Patterns and meanings. Using corpora of English language research and teaching. John Benjamins.
• Partington, A. (2004). Utterly content in each other’s company: semantic prosody and semantic preference. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9(1), 131-156. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.1.
• Ruhi, Ş. (2011, October 6-7). Creating a sustainable large corpus of spoken Turkish for multiple research purposes [Paper presentation].Ulusal Konuşma ve Dil Teknolojileri Platformu Kuruluşu: Türkçede Mevcut Durum Çalıştayı, TÜBİTAK-TÜSSİDE, TÜBİTAK-BİLGEM, Gebze.
• Ruhi, Ş., Hatipoğlu, Ç., Eröz-Tuğa, B., Işık-Güler, H. (2010). A Guideline for transcribing conversations for the construction of Spoken Turkish Corpora using EXMARaLDA and HIAT. ODTÜ-STD: Setmer Basımevi.
• Ruhi, Ş., Schmidt, T., Wörner, K., Eryılmaz, K. (2011). Annotating for precision and recall in speech act variation. The case of directives in the Spoken Turkish Corpus. Working Papers in Multilingualism. Proceedings of the Conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology (GSCL) (pp. 203- 206). http://www.corpora.uni-hamburg.de/gscl2011/ downloads/AZM96.pdf"
• Stubbs, M. (1983). Discourse Analysis: The Sociolinguistic Analysis of Natural Language. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
• Stubbs, M. (2002). Two quantitative methods of studying phraseology in English. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 7 (2), 215–244.
• Sunderland, J. (2004). Gendered discourses. Houndmills, Basingstoke, England New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Xiao, R., & McEnery, T. (2006). Collocation, semantic prosody, and near synonymy: A cross-linguistic perspective. Applied linguistics, 27(1), 103-129.