A semantic and pragmatic analysis of the Turkish word 'yalan': An application to Turkish native speakers

This study analyses the concept 'lie' yalan in Turkish from pragmatic and semantic aspects and shows prototypes of the concept "lie" and how Turkish native speakers perceive the concept, on the basis of Coleman and Kay's (1981) analysis of "lie" in English. The questionnaire applied in the Coleman and Kay's study consists of various combinations of lie elements. The present study includes a research adapting the questionnaire, which was also used in Arabic, Spanish and Indonesian before, into Turkish and statistical results of the research. The study tries to answer the following research questions: (i) Does the Turkish word yalan 'lie' contain prototypical elements of a lie introduced by Coleman and Kay? (ii) If so, what would be the order of importance of these elements in Turkish? (iii) Do native speakers of Turkish evaluate the situations containing lies similarly to speakers of the other languages? Findings from the study, together with the support of the presence of lie elements proposed by Coleman and Kay (1981), have revealed that the two main elements of the concept "lie" in Turkish are (1) speaker's intention to deceive and (2) speaker's belief that the statement is false, and (3) on the contrary of some languages, in Turkish, the concepts of "lie" and "false" are distinguished from each other. Moreover, it has been observed that Turkish native speakers may interpret some fictions differently, and pragmatic and cultural factors, considered as necessities for social lies by Hardin (2010), are elucidatory for this matter as well.