A cross-cultural study of the speech act of congratulation in British English and Turkish using a corpus approach

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Eğitim Fakültesi, Yabancı Diller Eğitimi Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2011

Öğrenci: HÜMEYRA CAN

Danışman: ÇİLER HATİPOĞLU

Özet:

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 Natural Semantic Metalanguage 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 conceptualisation. The thesis aims to contribute to the areas of foreign language education, intercultural/cross-cultural communication and pragmatics.