The plaza variety, also known as “plaza language” and “plaza speech” in social contexts, is a speech style that has emerged as a result of the neoliberal policies implemented in Turkey since the 1990s. This style is commonly observed among individuals working in multinational companies engaged in global trade in major cities and has gained significant attention in recent years. This increased visibility has led to various opinions and assessments of this speech style. Therefore, this study aims to analyse individuals’ perceptions of the plaza variety through the concept of language ideology and to clarify the language ideologies associated with this speech style. The study focuses on the assessments made by individuals on Ekşi Sözlük regarding the plaza variety, examining these assessments from a socio-semiotic perspective and explaining the development of the emerging language ideologies. The main finding of the study is that the language ideologies related to the plaza variety are closely linked to the language and educational reforms of the early Republican period. Moreover, the study has identified that language ideologies differ based on individuals’ varying interests, concerns, and levels of awareness.

This paper aims to explore cross-linguistic variation in conceptual metaphors related to weather with a particular focus on precipitation (rain) and temperature (heat). We specifically examine how metaphorical mappings differ across languages concerning lexical category (i.e., nouns, verbs, adjectives) and source domain. Drawing on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), we analyse weather descriptions from ten typologically diverse languages: Turkish, English, Polish, Italian, Persian, Filipino, German, French, Swahili, and Korean. We elicited these descriptions through email correspondence with native speakers, all of whom possess at least an intermediate level of English. We asked informants to describe two weather scenes (i.e., rainy and sunny) in their native languages and then to provide literal English translations of their descriptions. This method allowed us to observe how metaphorical expressions are grammatically and lexically encoded across linguistic systems. We find that metaphorical variation aligns with the dynamic vs. stative nature of weather events: rain, as a dynamic phenomenon, is more frequently expressed through motion-based metaphors, while heat, as a stative condition, tends to be framed via state or intensity-based metaphors. Moreover, while conceptual metaphors show cross-linguistic consistency, their grammatical realisation regarding lexical categories and argument structure varies according to language-specific typological patterns.

Düzgün Türkçe (proper Turkish) is an expression used to refer to well-formed linguistic structures and orthography. On Twitter, where the digital language is visible, language users, by employing the expression, comment on others’ spelling styles about what is “true” or “false.” In the context of Turkey’s ongoing conflict on the use of Latin scripts after Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) policymakers’ voices over the alphabet, I argue that the expression has gained social meanings associated with two diametrically opposing ideologies: Kemalism and neo-Ottomanism. Further, I also assert that there is a semiotic contrast between these two ideologies in the context of orthography. Thus, by being aware of this contrast and operating on the semiotic resources available to them, language users deploy their language ideologies. Drawing on interactional data on Twitter, this study brings an understanding of the process of how language users deploy their language ideologies by commenting on others’ spelling styles. In explaining the outworkings of this process, the study builds on the concept of indexical order.

We explore the media representation of the involvement of Fenerbahçe, a football club in Türkiye, in the 2011 Turkish Sports Corruption Scandal. Specifically, the study focuses on the discursive construction of Fenerbahçe’s ‘innocence’ and ‘corruption’ through the central arguments of Fenerbahçe’s self-defense and how the newsprint media represents these arguments of innocence in Türkiye. The data consist of the council board speech of the club’s president after his release, the front-page headlines, and the news reports of Turkish daily newspapers featuring the speech. In the study, adopting the critical discourse analysis framework, we discuss that the newspapers either recontextualize the innocence arguments or set them aside to pursue their ideological stances. Besides, our analysis reveals that the newspapers ultimately ignore Fenerbahçe’s arguments about the existence of a secret criminal organization endeavoring to gain control of Fenerbahçe via match-fixing claims and the state via a civil coup.

This study aims to set forth how Syrians in Turkey are framed as ‘other’ during some social events discussed in Twitter platform. As a theoretical framework, the study adopts Discourse-Historical Approach, which critically evaluates the exploitation of discourse by power groups in such a way as to distance a particular social group. Framing Syrians as ‘the other’ is studied from an argumentative perspective, based on the standpoints raised by the Twitter users and the arguments they use to defend these standpoints. Accordingly, argumentative analysis is achieved by implementing the reconstructive methodology offered by Pragma-Dialectics and evaluated based on the Discourse-Historical Approach. On analysing 186 tweets, 18 negative labels and standpoints were detected, corresponding to 15 different themes. As a case in point, the most frequently used label ‘privileged’ is exemplified, along with the standpoint ‘The privileges that are not given to the Turkish people are awarded to the Syrians’, and its supporting arguments.

Expressions used in languages to describe weather events such as precipitation and temperature are called meteorological expressions. Examining how the these expressions are semantically encoded and expressed, the current study makes a typological analysis on meteorological expressions in Turkish. In this context, the study analyzes how the typology proposed by Eriksen et al. (2012), who presented a semantic analysis of how languages encode meteorological expressions based on data from various world languages, will fit into Turkish. In the light of this purpose, certain meteorological expressions in Turkish have been classified and it has been questioned which unit or units in the sentence structure semantically encode these expressions. Considering this, when the meteorological expressions presenting dynamic events are examined, as for the precipitation, the study reveals that the expression of rain is cognate argument-predicate type; on the other hand, the study further reveals that the expressions snow, hail, and rime were encoded by both argument-predicate and predicate types. It has been found that the expressions lightning and thunder, as part of other dynamic events, are encoded by argument type, and the expression wind is encoded by both argument-predicate and predicate types. In terms of stative events including temperature, atmosphere and mild weather events, Turkish displays a similar appearance to the overall tendency among world languages. Such meteorological expressions are encoded only by predicate type in Turkish. The expression containing the meaning of sunlight is encoded by argument-predicate type in Turkish.

This research asserts that such features as the frequency of stop words and punctuation marks are sufficient for author identification of the texts that are column-long. Six of Cumhuriyet columnists who periodically write in the newspaper were selected and 120 columns were collected from each. Nine features based on the frequency of particular stop words and punctuation marks were extracted. Eight supervised machine learning algorithms were trained with extracted feature set. Author identification performance of each algorithm was measured. The effect of dimension reduction and scaling on each algorithm were also examined. Following these procedures, minimum 82% and maximum 92% accuracy were obtained. It is also found that scaling or dimension reduction with principal component analysis (PCA) do not create significant difference alone on accuracy scores, while scaling and linear discriminant analysis significantly increases the validation scores of some of algorithms such as support vector machines (p<0.05), Gaussian Naïve Bayes, and k-nearest neighbour (p<0.001). Moreover, when feature importance of random forest algorithm is analysed, average word count in a sentence and comma frequency are found as the most important features for detecting the authors.

Hayır means both ‘good’ and ‘no’ in present-day Turkish. Hayır ‘good’ has been predominantly associated with a religious undertone. Recently, the Neo-Ottoman movement under the AKP has built on this connotation to promote their political ideology. In the 2017 Turkish constitutional referendum, the Turkish people decided whether they wanted to endorse this ideology: Evet (yes) meant increasing the power of the presidency and the AKP, while hayır (no) meant sustaining the competency of the parliamentary system. This led to an odd situation where a pro-democratic vote and a diametral Neo-Ottoman ideology were expressed with the same word. No-voters soon began to take up this homonymy to contest the regime. By entering Neo-Ottoman ‘good’ into a dialogue with ‘no’, the second meaning of hayır, they managed to alter its meaning to directly oppose Neo-Ottomanism. To make sense of the mechanism behind this and such cases of lexical appropriation, we apply Silverstein’s (1976, 2003) theory of indexicality and indexical orders. We put forward the idea that focussing on the motivations of the relevant parties initiating or contesting the change alone falls short of the complexity of the phenomenon. The meaning change can only be fully understood when accounting for the complex indexical history of the appropriated word.

This work aims to bring an understanding to an ongoing process of social meaning making on a youth persona called tiki, which refers to young people, mostly girls, who have wealthy backgrounds or who want to be, and thus, seem like that. Since the very beginning of the 1990s, the term tiki has acquired different social meanings that refer to such personae as ciks, tiki and Pelinsu that cover both men and women. However, in the course of this diachronic process, the term has recently been labelled as Pelinsu, which is a female given name, and thus, has acquired social meanings that denote only the women. To make sense of the mechanism behind this process, the study draws on Ekşi Sözlük descriptions of tiki and Pelinsu and applies analytical framework developed under the theory of indexicality, namely the indexical field. The findings are important for two reasons; firstly, social meaning making process is dynamic in the sense that how Ekşi Sözlük users project and construct social personae of tiki and Pelinsu. In addition, this study provides an analytical framework to the future studies that aim to bring an understanding to how youth identity in Turkey is socially constructed and projected.

In variationist sociolinguistics that emerged out of the works by Labov (1966), social meaning has been defined by linking linguistic variables (i.e. Prosody, word, affix, allophones) to broad social categories (i.e. Gender, class and region). However, the studies given lately assert that the social meaning is found in the society in dynamic and cumulative ways (Agha, 2003; Eckert, 2008; Silverstein, 2003). This ideologically accumulated knowledge, which is either called as ‘indexical order’ (Silverstein, 2003) or ‘indexical field’ (Eckert, 2008), has been described as collective social meanings which are not stable and fixed and thus bearing the probability of changing according to social movements. In this regard, this study, which resides in the field of sociophonetics, aims to uncover indexical fields that emerge in the perception of pitch-width, e.g., the range between the highest and the lowest pitch in speech. With this aim, the study focuses on the perception of speech, and not how people speak. A tripartite experimental design has been employed: (i) In the first stage, recordings were adopted by speakers through interviews and map-task (N=8) to form speech stimuli. (ii) Then, the speech stimuli were further manipulated in terms of pitch-width and duration to create tokens. (iii) In the last stage, the 12 tokens determined were presented to the perception of the listeners through sociolinguistic group interviews (N=52) and matched-guise survey (Lambert et al., 1960) (In three sessions, N=224). The qualitative findings yielded by the sociolinguistic group interviews which were conducted with university students were later presented to random population through matched-guise survey, and the quantitative results obtained from the survey were analysed by employing factor analysis and linear/mixed effect models. As a result, it has been found that the indexical fields on the pitch-width are determined by the perceived education level of the speakers. In the indexical interpretation of ‘education level’, there are such implications as dominance, having a job which requires distinct education level, using standard language, reliability and formality.

Perception of phonetic variables alongside social meanings has been the preliminary research question in the field of sociolinguistics in the last twenty years. The theoretical debate fostered in answering this research question is that the social meaning is found dynamically and cumulatively in the society during production and perception. The nature of social meaning in perception is dependent upon such factors as which contexts are found in the environment where the perception occurs and what social information is accessed by the listeners. In that vein, this study presents the current discussions on the notions indexicality and sociolinguistic stance that have been employed to bring an understanding to the conventional and stereotypical relationships between linguistic form and social meaning in the recent stages of sociolinguistics, and employs it on two group interviews as a case that has been conducted on the perception of the sociophonetic variable [ɹ] in Turkish.

Bu kitap, bir dilin kendi içinde gerçekleşen ve toplumda ağız, şive ve lehçe gibi kavramlarla adlandırılan farklı konuşma biçimlerinin akademik açıdan nasıl açıklanabileceğine yönelik bir rehber olma amacı taşımaktadır. 1960’larda William Labov’un çalışmalarıyla ortaya çıkan değişkeci toplumdilbilim, farklı konuşma biçimlerine yönelik o döneme dek yürütülen çalışmaları yöntem açısından büyük oranda etkiledi. Bu dönüşümden en çok etkilenen alan ise bu farklı konuşma biçimlerini coğrafi açıdan inceleyen lehçebilim oldu. Ne var ki ortaya çıkan Labov etkisi, Türkiye'deki dil değişkenliği çalışmalarında evrensel alanyazında olduğu kadar etki yaratmadı. Kitap, Türkiye bağlamında dil değişkenliği üzerine gözlemleri olan fakat araştırma sorularını kurgulamakta güçlük çeken araştırmacılar, dil değişkenliğinin evrensel alanyazındaki görünümü hakkında sahip olduğu bilgiyi güncellemek isteyen dilbilimciler ve dil değişkenliğine yönelik genel bir bilgi çerçevesi oluşturmak isteyen araştırmacılar ve öğrenciler için alanda kullanılan kavramsal çerçeveyi ve yöntembilimi sunmaktadır.

Bu çalışma, geleneksel medya araçlarından gazete ve televizyon ve yeni medya araçlarından Twitter üzerinden koronavirüs hastalığının nasıl adlandırıldığına, hangi özellikler ile nitelendiğine, nasıl savlandığına, hangi bakış açısından değerlendirildiğine ve nasıl konumlandırıldığına ve ortaya konulan bu değerlendirmelerin nasıl yoğunlaştığına odaklanarak koronafobinin söylemsel inşasına dair bir inceleme ve öngörü ortaya koymaktadır. Birçok açıdan öncül olan bu çalışmada, toplumsal bir sorun olarak hastalığa yönelik yoğunlaştırılmış olumsuzlama söylemlerinin bir korku kültürü yaratmadaki katkısı tartışılmaktadır. Koronavirüs hastalığı üzerine yapılmış dil ve dilbilim merkezli bir söylem çözümlemesi çalışması olarak disiplinlerarası bir boşluğu doldurmayı ve dilbilim dışında yapılacak çalışmalara dilsel/göstergesel kanıtlar üzerinden yaklaşımsal ve yöntembilimsel bir katkı sunmayı da amaçlayan bu çalışma, TÜBİTAK 1002 No’lu Hızlı Destek Programı (220K278) çerçevesinde desteklenmiştir.

1960’lardan sonra toplumsal dilbilimin (sociolinguistics) gelişmesiyle dilsel çeşitlilik araştırmaları da farklı boyutlarıyla ilgi çekmeye başlamıştır. Dilsel çeşitlilik literatürünün büyük bir kısmı nın oluşturulduğu dil olan İngilizcede bu alan genellikle linguistic variation veya linguistic variability olarak adlandırılır. Dilsel ve toplumbilimsel çeşitlenmenin son yıllarda Türkçe literatürde de yoğun ilgi görmeye başlaması bu kitabın hazırlanması için itici güç oluşturmuştur. Kitaptaki yazılarda çeşitlenme farklı boyutlarıyla ele alınmıştır.

The studies on the linguistic variation in Turkey date back to 1867. Following the Turkish Language Reform in 1932, there has emerged a growing body of literature on the regional aspects of linguistic variation within the boundaries of dialectology. On this vast literature, problems with the methodology of these studies have been noted and reviewed by various researchers working in the field since 1971. Although these review studies have focused on varied topics, no systematic overview and proposals have been laid out with respect to the conceptual framework, methodology and social aspects of the linguistic variation. In this respect, by focusing on the arguments about the methodological flaws yielded by the researchers, the current work provides a systematic analysis of these review studies. In addition, the study also tackles the problems associated with the overviews and the proposals asserted by these studies. Overviewing the review studies given in the literature and proposing a sociolinguistic basis, the present study pinpoints future research themes and forms a reference source for subsequent endeavours.

Türkiye'de sesbilim ve sesbilgisi alanlarında uzman araştırmacılar tarafından kaleme alınan ilk ve tek olan bu kitap, dilbilimin önemli bir araştırma alanı olan sesbilim alanına ilişkin kuramsal yaklaşımları, arakesitleri, modelleri ve uygulamalı alanları, yöntem ve teknikleri tanımlayan kapsamlı bir çalışmadır. İki ana bölümden oluşan kitabın ilk kısmı olan Kuramsal Bölüm; seslem, titreşim, lilik hiyerarşisi, sözcük vurgusu, sesbilimin diğer dilbilim alanlarıyla etkileşimini betimleyen arakesitler, biçimbilim, sözdizim, bürün dizgesi, anlambilim, toplumdilbilim gibi bölümlerinden oluşmaktadır. Kitabın ikinci ana kısmını oluşturan Uygulamalı Bölümde ise; sesbilgisi, akustik kuramlar, adli sesbilim, konuşmacı tanıma, hesaplamalı sesbilgisi, ünlü formant normalizasyonu, ünlü dörtgeni, ezgi sentezleme, metinden konuşma sentezleme, matematiksel sesbilgisi, bürün dizgesi, dünyadaki işaret dillerinde ve Türk İşaret Dilinde sesbilimsel görünümler, bürünsel sözcük, anadili öğretiminde sesbilimsel görünümler, Milli Eğitim Bakanlığı'nın 2019 Türkçe Öğretim Programı, ikinci dilde sesletim, aksanlılık, anlaşılabilirlik gibi alt konular ilk defa bu kitapta bir araya getirilmiştir.

Söylemlerarasılık farklı söylemlerin ve türlerin kendilerinin ait olduğu iletişim olayları dışındaki alanlarda ortaya çıkması ile oluşur ve ‘söylem dizileri’ (orders of discourse) arasında söyleşimsel (dialogic) özellikte bağlantı kurarak yeni söylem yapılarının ve etkinlik alanlarının oluşmasını sağlar. Bu çerçevede çalışma, Osmanlıspor’un Avrupa Ligi’nde oynadığı altı maç sırasında kullanıcılar tarafından Twitter’da oluşturulan gönderileri söylemlerarasılık çerçevesinde inceler. Çalışmanın verisini Osmanlıspor ve Osmanlı sözcükleri ile belirlenmiş 260 Twitter gönderisi oluşturmaktadır. Bu gönderiler, sözcelerin, metinlerin, türlerin ve söylemlerin metinlerarası ve söylemlerarası ilişkilerine odaklanan Söylem Tarihsel Yaklaşımın (STY) kavramsal ve yöntembilimsel araçları üzerinden incelenmiştir. Çalışmada, öncelikle gönderilerin konusal önermeleri (topoi) belirlenmiş ve daha sonra metafor ve ad aktarımı üzerinden nitel bir inceleme gerçekleştirilmiştir. Çalışmada, tarihi bir gönderime sahip olan Osmanlı temasının kavramsal içeriklerinden biri olan savaş kavramının kendi bağlamına ait olarak kurgulanmış olduğu söylem dizisinin yeni bir bağlama taşınarak futbol oyununu gösterir biçimde kullanıldığı görülmüştür.

In a cross-linguistic perspective, propositions bearing communicative contents are realized and interpreted in various forms of syntax, phonology and pragmatics, and this gives rise to structural realization of Information Structure (IS). Focus, as an information structural component which gives new information, takes different accounts from various perspectives. The three different accounts, which propose their own content based on grammars of languages, are in conflict with each other: (i) Syntactic constraints, (ii) prosodic constraints and (iii) syntax-prosody interface constraints. In the studies given on the IS of Turkish, there are debates on (i) position and (ii) structural realization of focus. The former, which includes proposals on the position of focus, argues that it is whether immediately preverbal or any preverbal position that hosts the focus. The latter, which hold arguments on the structural realization of focus, primes such structural realizations as syntactic, prosodic or both. In order to deal with these proposals on the IS of Turkish, this study implements Optimality Theory (OT) to bring a preliminary formal account on the IS of sentences with indefinite non-specific and non-referential direct objects which impose certain restrictions on IS and thus, give a fine-grained constraint hierarchy. In regard to the constraints which have either syntactic or prosodic backgrounds, this study provides an exhaustive constraint interaction between syntactic and prosodic operations taken place on the sentences analysed.