The Corpus of Turkish Youth Language (COTY): The compilation and interactional dynamics of a spoken corpus

2022-9-2
Efeoğlu Özcan, Esranur
This study examines the previously unattained research area of contemporary spoken Turkish used in dyadic and multi-party interaction among young speakers of Turkish. For this purpose, a specialized corpus called the Corpus of Turkish Youth Language (CoTY) was compiled as a source of data and as a tool of analysis. Designed to offer a maximally representative sample of Turkish youth talk, the CoTY contains naturally occurring and spontaneous interactional data among young people between the ages of 14-18 from various socio-economic backgrounds in Turkey. It is a 168,748-word corpus within the single register of informal conversation exclusively among friends. It has 123 unique speakers (62 females and 61 males) and consists of 26 hours 11 minutes of spoken interaction. The corpus was constructed using the multilayer transcription and corpus construction software EXMARaLDA, the tools of Partitur-Editor, COMA, and EXAKT were utilized as corpus building, management, query and analysis tools. The interactional dynamics of the corpus data were examined through four groups of interactional markers; (i) response tokens, (ii) vocatives, (iii) vague expressions, and (iv) intensifiers. For each group of markers; types, distribution, and salient pragmatic functions were presented. The study contributes to sociopragmatic studies of youth language by using systematic, sustainable, and transparent approach to language through corpus methods. It is expected that the results of this study will provide baseline data for further studies on contemporary spoken Turkish and cross-linguistic youth language studies.

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Citation Formats
E. Efeoğlu Özcan, “The Corpus of Turkish Youth Language (COTY): The compilation and interactional dynamics of a spoken corpus,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2022.