A comparative analysis of discourse conjunction in Turkish and Arabic languages

The purpose of this study is to describe the function and semantic structure of the discourse conjunctions passed from the Arabic to Turkish languages. For this purpose, firstly a database was created from written texts translated from Turkish to Arabic and from Arabic to Turkish. After classifying the conjunction in terms of their modal and rethorical function, we tried to describe them in the collocational patterns they co-occur. The results of the work will shed light on the debate as to whether the features of the discourse conjunctions in discourse research are universal or not. For example, even though the frequency of its use varies, the conjunction 'but' is seen to indicate basic rhetoric opposition in both languages. Whereas it is used rarely in present day Arabic to imply 'contradiction', it has undergone semantic expansion in today's Turkish and has begun to be used productively a worker for compromise. This result shows that a discourse conjunction can also undergo semantic expansion in addition to its core meaning. The study, in this way could contribute to the science of translation and machine translation in computer linguistic researches. Keywords: Turkish Conjunction, Arabic Conjunction, Discourse Conjunction.