Discourse Meaning

The View from Turkish

Deniz Zeyrek, Umut Özge, Deniz Zeyrek, Umut Özge

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110686784
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The volume aims to bring together original, unpublished papers on discourse structure and meaning from different frameworks or theoretical perspectives to address research questions revolving around issues instigated by Turkish. Another goal is to offer methodologically different solutions for the research gaps identified in individual chapters. The contributions are based on empirical generalizations and make use of, for example, computerized corpora as the data, examples compiled from naturally occurring discourse, or data gathered in experimental conditions. Hence, the book has a firm theoretical standing and it is empirically well-grounded.

The collection is expected to be of direct interest to the community of scholars and researchers in discourse structure and semantics as well as corpus linguistics. It will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students and all interested readers, offering them a fresh view on various discourse-related phenomena from the perspective of Turkish.

Part I: Negation in discourse

Discourse negation via the ne … –sI structures in Turkish

Hasan Mesut Meral

Yıldız Teknik University, Department of Turkish Language Education, Faculty of Education, İstanbul, Turkey

Note: I am deeply indebted to Dr. Sabahat Tura for encouraging me to study linguistics and our discussions on the structure of Turkish. Her approach to Turkish linguistics inspired me a lot during my academic career and will continue to do so in the future.

I thank the editors and the reviewers of this volume for their invaluable remarks, criticism and suggestions which improved this work a lot. Usual disclaimers apply.

Abstract

The aim of this work is to investigate the issue of discourse negation observed in ne … –sI structures in Turkish casual conversations. We show that discourse negation observed in the structures under discussion involves strong objection to the original statement and a subsequent rectification of it. The strength of the utterance provided by the special linguistic forms and intonation in these structures is the main tool which differentiates them from other regular instances of negation in Turkish. We provide three sets of discussions for the issue: (i) argumentative discourse mode, (ii) tri-partite discourse structure, and (iii) descriptive vs. metalinguistic negation.

With respect to (i), the paper claims that the structures under discussion involve an argumentative discourse mode where Speaker B asserts a strong objection to, denial and refusal of the statement made by Speaker A as the first part of his/her answer. The consequent strong rectification in the second part of the answer by Speaker B is another support for the argumentative mode. For (ii), we show that a tri-partite discourse structure is observed where the first part involves an expectation statement by Speaker A, the second part includes Speaker B’s strong objection to this expectation, and the third part includes Speaker B’s strong rectification of the denied information. With respect to (iii), the paper shows that the structures under investigation have a dual nature with respect to descriptive vs. metalinguistic negation. We present some cases of descriptive negation with a strong objection as opposed to others that may include metalinguistic negation with weak or “fake” denials.

1 Introduction

Negation is traditionally defined as a logical operator which reverses the truth of a proposition. This semantics-oriented definition of negation has been the focus of many works in the literature (Klima 1964; Payne 1985; Frawley 1992 among others) and various types of negation within a sentence have been investigated (sentential vs. verbal negation as involving an external negation operator vs. internal one respectively). Accordingly, negative elements may cover (i) the whole proposition in a sentence having the widest scope in the logical structure: propositional negation (Payne 19...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Discourse structure and discourse meaning: The view from Turkish
• Part I: Negation in discourse
• Part II: Discourse functions of reference
• Part III: Subjectivity in discourse
• Part IV: Assessment of discourse-annotated corpora
• Index