A Pragmatic Function-Position Analysis of Address Terms: Tendencies in Turkish

Abstract

This study, with the broader aim of describing the addressing system in Turkish, analyzes the addressing terms as inseparable parts of communication, in terms of their sentential positions, pragmatic functions and function-position mapping properties on the database of Turkish National Corpus and presents the findings within a synthesis of broader literature on different languages. With that purpose in mind, three research questions will be answered. The first one is about the pragmatic functions of address terms in Turkish in the corpus data, the second one is about the interaction of these functions with their sentential positions and third one is about the extent to which the findings of the study and the findings in the literature for other languages. A specified sub-set from the Turkish National Corpus (TNCV3) (Aksan, 2012) was used as the database of pieces of natural language. The three major findings of the study are that Turkish address terms have ten basic functions, these functions occur in four different sentential positions, there are some tendencies in function-position mappings and that although there are Turkish specific aspects, correspondences with the studies especially in English are much more. With its Turkish specific findings, the study will hopefully contribute to the analyses of the addressing systems in languages as a whole.