THE INTERACTIONAL FUNCTIONS OF tamam IN SPOKEN TURKISH

Abstract: The paper presents a corpus-driven, qualitative investigation of the interactional marker (IM) tamam, in the Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC). The study observes that the lexical meaning of tamam as the ‘completion’ of a previous verbal of non-verbal social activity spills over into its pragmatic meaning. The last section of study briefly compares tamam and peki. It finds that tokens of tamam far outnumber the occurrence of peki in STC, and interprets this finding within changing cultures of politeness and the epistemic values of the IMs. The paper concludes that epistemic meaning can acquire deontic and procedural meaning, which is a hallmark of IMs.