Appraisal meaning in Turkish: The use of adjectives in context of Turkish

Analyzing the meanings arising from the combination of the interpersonal metafunction of language and language strata in the analysis of language use is one issue that has gained importance in recent years. The evaluative dimension of language, which emerges from the association of the discourse-semantics strata of language with the interpersonal metafunction of language, enables the analysis of evaluative meaning through various linguistic units and structures. Evaluation, among the essential functions of language use, constitutes a reflection of the actions of making sense of and interpreting the external world through emotions and thoughts. Both emotional and evaluative reactions play an important role in this function of language use in terms of communication value. While emotional reactions express a personal opinion, evaluative reactions emerge as linguistic manifestations of positive and/or negative reactions to a person, situation or other entity within the system of social values (Hunston 1994: 210). This shows that the evaluative function of language has both subjective (emotional reactions) and intersubjective (evaluative reactions) dimensions (Hunston, 2011:12). This study aims to reveal the relationship between language patterns and attitudinal positioning by focusing on attitude in the framework of Appraisal Theory (Martin and White 2005; 2007). Within the framework of this purpose, the study focuses on adjectives that function within the scope of attitudinal positioning, affect, judgement and appreciation in the Turkish textbooks used in mother-tongue teaching. In the study, by using the document analysis method, the adjectives that possess the evaluative function of attitudinal positioning are analyzed with the content analysis technique to reveal the characteristics of these linguistic units within the scope of grammatical, semantic, appraisal and pattern criteria, as well as the interaction between attitude types and text types. The findings show that in Turkish written discourse in Turkish textbooks, the attitudinal locus is frequently preferred in appreciation, judgement and affect. In addition, it has been concluded that attitudinal positioning takes place in explicit forms in Turkish textbooks. It has been revealed that the attitude of affect is chosen with the component of happiness, the attitude of judgement is selected with the element of social esteem, and the attitude of appreciation is determined with the value component in Turkish textbooks. It was observed that the semantic properties of adjectival evaluative linguistic units differed according to the type of attitude. It was observed that nominative and derivational forms of adjective-qualified evaluative linguistic units were preferred in morphological features. The effect of reduction and reinforcement types on attitudinal positioning was low. However, the description of the syntactic features of adjectival linguistic units enabled the linguistic patterns related to attitudinal positioning to be revealed. As a result of the change in the syntactic features of each attitude type within the scope of the study, both complementation and phrasal patterns of adjectival evaluative linguistic units were reached. Finally, it was revealed that there was no difference in the interaction between attitudinal positioning and text types; that is, three attitude types were frequently found in both informative and fictional texts in Turkish textbooks. These results show that the texts selected in Turkish language teaching textbooks predominantly reflect subjective and intersubjective language use. The fact that emotional and evaluative responses are frequently included in Turkish language teaching textbooks shows that students perform perception and universalization processes with appraised meaning during conceptualization. This means that perception and universalization actions cannot be performed independently from evaluative units in mother-tongue teaching. The study is thought to make a significant contribution to the field due to its new directions to adjective semantic studies in Turkish and the conclusions it reveals about attitudinal positioning in Turkish textbooks.