How do we say NO in Turkish?: A corpus-based analysis of hayır and cık in Turkish

This study aims to investigate the use of two pragmatic markers in Turkish language: hayır and cık. Hayır is a word meaning no, whereas cık stands as a representation of a sound uttered with the intention of saying no. These two markers, which can be traditionally accepted as no in English, are analyzed in terms of their distributions and pragmatic functions as pragmatic markers. To examine these markers recordings of naturally occurring conversations among people whose L1 is Turkish are obtained from Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC). The results show that there are similarities and differences in the use of hayır and cık in terms of their syntactic properties and pragmatic functions.   Keywords: Pragmatic markers, Turkish, hayır, cık, Pragmatic function, Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC)

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This study aims to investigate the use of two pragmatic markers in Turkish language: hayır and cık. Hayır is a word meaning no, whereas cık stands as a representation of a sound uttered with the intention of saying no. These two markers, which can be traditionally accepted as no in English, are analyzed in terms of their distributions and pragmatic functions as pragmatic markers. To examine these markers recordings of naturally occurring conversations among people whose L1 is Turkish are obtained from Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC). The results show that there are similarities and differences in the use of hayır and cık in terms of their syntactic properties and pragmatic functions.

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