The Diversity among the Reason and Purpose Denoting Wh-Adverbs in Turkish

Authors : Sinan Çakır

Pages : 71-86

Doi:10.54316/dilarastirmalari.1467462

View : 58 | Download : 41

Publication Date : 2024-11-10

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :The study was carried out to determine the contexts in which the single word reason and purpose denoting wh-adverbs in Turkish are used more frequently than one another. The target wh-adverbs are neden, niye and niçin, all of which are translated into English as why. It is argued here that niçin and niye focus on the goal of the target event which will take place in the future while neden focuses on the cause of the target event that took place in the past. Another argument was that the preference over niye and niçin also varies in accordance with the given context. A gap filling task (n-82; 49 female, 33 male; age: 19.5), a wh-question formation task (n-63; 42 female, 21 male, age: 20,7) and a corpus based analysis (Turkish National Corpus, 1157 interrogative sentence) were carried out to test the arguments. The obtained results supported the hypotheses of the study. Niçin and niye are more prominent in denoting purpose while neden is more preferable in expressing reason. It was also observed that the frequencies for niye and niçin vary with the given contexts. The existence of the other adverbs in the target context influences the preference over them.
Keywords : Türkçe, ne belirteçleri, sebep, amaç, bağlam