Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
12th International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2023), Lancaster, İngiltere, 3 - 06 Temmuz 2023
This talk presents the design criteria and structural characteristics of the Corpus of Turkish Youth Language (CoTY), which is the first youth talk corpus compiled for contemporary spoken Turkish, and provides an overview of pragmatic functions of vocatives in this corpus. The CoTY is a 168,748-word corpus within the single register of informal conversation exclusively among friends. Designed to offer a maximally representative sample of Turkish youth talk, the CoTY includes naturally occurring and spontaneous interactional data among 123 unique speakers (62 females and 61 males) between the ages of 14-18 from various socio-economic backgrounds in Turkey. The corpus was constructed using the multilayer transcription and corpus construction software EXMARaLDA, the tools of Partitur-Editor, COMA, and EXAKT were utilized as corpus building, management, query and analysis tools. The construction of this corpus enables the previously unattained research area of contemporary spoken Turkish used in dyadic and multi-party interaction among young speakers of Turkish. After describing the architecture of the corpus, this talk will focus on the nominal vocatives which are used as interactional markers among Turkish speaking youth. The overview of nominal vocatives in the CoTY with regard to addressers, addressees, semantic categories, pragmatic extension, address shifts, register- specific uses indicate that young speakers of Turkish use vocatives to attend to both organizational and interpersonal needs they experience in interaction with their friends. The results corroborate the perspective that the repertoire of vocatives is extensively used to project and enhance the intimate level of relationship the speakers have by attending to face concerns and creating playful and humorous tone in interaction. It is expected that the results of this study will provide baseline data for further studies on contemporary spoken Turkish and cross linguistic youth language studies.