HAYIR AND YOK AS PRAGMATIC MARKERS IN TURKISH: FINDINGS FROM SPOKEN TURKISH CORPUS

Pragmatic markers (PM) are linguistic items in “talk-in-interaction” performing not only functions peculiar to that grammatical category but also various pragmatic functions such as topic shift, coherence, turn taking strategy, repair and etc. within the context of communication. Even though pragmatic markers in Turkish have also been the focus of some recent studies, negation markers on the propositional level hayır and its correspondent yok have not been investigated in spoken Turkish discourse within the framework of pragmatics and conversation analysis yet. The present study draws on hayır and yok as pragmatic markers in Turkish which have, thus far, been examined by paying attention to the only negation function without considering the notions of context of situation and pragmatic interpretation. In this sense, this study aims at identifying qualitative and quantitative aspects of hayır and yok as pragmatic markers in Turkish spoken conversational discourse through a representative corpus-database, the Spoken Turkish Corpus (STC) within the analytic framework of conversation analysis and functional-pragmatic approach. Hereby, detailed analysis on these PMs from the STC showed that hayır and yok as pragmatic markers carry a complex conversational workload, and namely appear to have both textual and interactional uses, most of the time simultaneously.