Some thanking expressions in Turkish: A corpus-based analysis

This study examines some single-word and multi-word expressions used to express gratitude in Turkish, such as şükran, mersi, müteşekkir, varol, eyvallah, Allah razı olsun, Allah tuttuğunu altın etsin ve minnettar, through natural language data. In the study, systematic aspects of lexical linguistic pattern analysis of thanking formulae and corpus-based analysis of thanking strategies were presented by focusing on the methods used by Turkish speakers to express gratitude. It also aims to reveal the preferences of native speakers through the contextual exchange of thanking expressions and the results obtained from natural language data. Accordingly, the study was conducted on the axis of two research questions including the lexical grammatical pattern analyses of these thanking expressions in Turkish and the pragmatic functions of them. For this purpose, through the natural language data taken from the TNC, some thanking expressions and their rapport management strategies were revealed. The study holistically, aims to test the universal aspects that were examined in detail in foreign literature and to contribute to the lexico-grammatical and pragmatic aspects of the Turkish thanking literature by examining these expressions through natural language data. In the study, the thanking strategies put forward in other studies for Turkish were revised based on an extensive data together with structural and pragmatic explanations which are hoped to be complementary to the previous literature. As for the findings, şükran is the mostly used term in the database of spoken and written Turkish and the classification of other thanking expressions in terms of text types and domains in the TNC reveals their usages in formal and in informal settings. The findings have also shown that thanking someone explicitly is the mostly used thanking formulae in Turkish. The study is hoped to contribute to the prosepective studies on thanking in Turkish.