Browsing results for Turkic

(1987) Various languages – Value-judgment terms

Hill, Deborah (1987). A cross-linguistic study of value-judgement terms. MA thesis, Australian National University.

The purpose of this thesis is to try to establish the extent to which the words good, bad, true and right can be considered lexical universals. These words have been chosen because they are value-judgment terms that, individually, have been discussed at length by philosophers. It seems to be assumed by philosophers and semanticists that these words reflect concepts shared by speakers of all languages. By testing whether these words are candidates for lexical universals we can then see the extent to which this assumption is true.

On the basis of information from native speakers from 15 diverse languages, we can say that good and bad reflect language independent concepts (GOOD and BAD). However, in many languages, including English, the range of meaning of bad is narrower than the range of meaning of good. By looking at five of these fifteen languages we can see that the words right and true reflect concepts that are not language
independent. Thus, by taking a cross-linguistic approach, we can shed some light on the work done by language philosophers in the area of value-judgment terms.

The following languages are examined in this thesis: Arabic, Arrernte, Chinese (Mandarin), English, Ewe, Fijian, Finnish, Indonesian, Kannada, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish.


Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

(2011) English, Turkish – Speech acts

Can, Hümeyra (2011). A cross-cultural study of the speech act of congratulation in British English and Turkish using a corpus approach. MA thesis, Middle East Technical University, Ankara.

PDF: Open access

Abstract:

This study aims to find out the culturally different conceptualizations of congratulation in British culture and tebrik and kutlama in Turkish culture using a corpus approach and to formulate cultural scripts for these three performative verbs using the NSM approach. More specifically, the study aims to reveal the contexts where the target speech act is used and to uncover the kinds of strategies/components employed in these situations.

To be able to collect the targeted data, the study begins with the monolingual and bilingual dictionary definitions of the performative verbs (i.e., congratulate, tebrik etmek and kutlamak) and then follows a corpus approach whereby the performative verbs and their various lexical forms are searched for in various corpora (i.e., BYU-BNC, MTC, Google). In total, 47 dictionaries are looked up and 442 contexts of congratulation, 339 contexts of tebrik and 348 contexts of kutlama are collected from the newspaper and blog genres in the three corpora. The analyses of the data aim to uncover the qualitative and quantitative features of congratulation, tebrik and kutlama in British and Turkish cultures.

The results of the study show that there are some cultural differences as well as similarities in the conceptualization of the speech act of congratulation in terms of its contexts of use and strategies. The findings also demonstrate the usefulness of the corpus approach in studying speech acts and their conceptualization.


Approximate application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner

(2017) English, Turkish – Emotions

Karaaslan, Hatice (2017). A contrastive analysis of English anger-fury and Turkish kızgınlık-öfke. Karadeniz, 36, 119-136.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.17498/kdeniz.357575 / Open access

Abstract:

This study investigates one particular area within the emotion lexicon of English and Turkish, focusing on two anger-related emotion terms in each of the two languages. It explores how the terms relate to each other intra-linguistically and whether, from a contrastive point of view, their cognitive scenarios match. The core meanings of the target concepts are claimed to show a high degree of correspondence; differences in immediacy and intensity do not (according to the author) appear to prompt the need for differentiation. The English emotion concept anger is said to match the Turkish emotion concept kızgınlık, and likewise for fury and öfke. Accordingly, the same reductive paraphrases can be used for the English words and for their Turkish counterparts.

The claims contained in this paper need to be approached with caution: the so-called “high degree of correspondence” may not be high enough to warrant identical explications across the two languages.

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Crude application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner