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On Diversity and Complexity of Languages Spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia
Edited by Pirkko Suihkonen and Lindsay J. Whaley
[Studies in Language Companion Series 164] 2014
► pp. 251–274

On the distribution of the contrastive-concessive discourse connectives ama ‘but/yet’ and fakat ‘but’ in written Turkish

| Middle East Technical University

This chapter analyzes the similarities and differences between two contrastive-concessive discourse connectives in written Turkish, namely ama ‘but/yet’ and fakat ‘but’. The analysis is mainly based on Turkish Discourse Bank, a corpus annotated for discourse connectives and the discourse units they relate. A modular approach to discourse is adopted in the study, where the connectives are analyzed considering the characteristics of their arguments, their position in the sentence, the senses they convey, and how they are distributed across genres. The analyses are carried out quantitatively and qualitatively. One of the major findings of the study is that ama signals concession and pragmatic interpretations more readily than fakat does, suggesting that ama has a better ability to access inferences in discourse. The study also finds that while ama is the preferred discourse connective of fiction, fakat is the preferred discourse connective of more formal genres (e.g. research papers, monographs).

Keywords: concession, contrast, corpus, discourse, discourse connectives, discourse relations, Turkish
Published online: 17 December 2014
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.164.09zey
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