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Article published In: Register Studies
Vol. 6:1 (2024) ► pp.60–90

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Linguistic variation beyond the Indo-European web

Analyzing Turkish web registers in TurCORE

ORCiD logo with link | University of Turku
ORCiD logo with link | University of Oulu
ORCiD logo with link | University of Turku
ORCiD logo with link | University of Turku
Published online: 17 December 2024
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.24002.ert
Abstract
A register, defined as a text variety with specific situational characteristics and a communicative purpose (Biber, D., & Conrad, S. (2019). Register, genre, and style (2nd ed). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), is also recognized as a cultural construct (Biber, D., & Egbert, J. (2023). What is a register? Accounting for linguistic and situational variation within — and outside of — textual varieties. Register Studies, 5(1), 1–22. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). Registers merit thorough investigation due to their pivotal role in reflecting linguistic and cultural landscapes. However, existing studies predominantly focus on Indo-European languages. This study investigates Turkish web registers through the introduction of the Turkish Corpus of Online Registers (TurCORE). Comprising 2,780 web texts, TurCORE was manually annotated using a register taxonomy targeting the entire unrestricted web and identifying 24 web register categories. By employing Text Dispersion Keyword Analysis (Egbert, J., & Biber, D. (2019). Incorporating text dispersion into keyword analyses. Corpora, 14(1), 77–104. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), the research examines the register characteristics with a specific focus on news reports, interactive discussions, and recipes, drawing comparisons with their English equivalents. Results reveal parallels between Turkish and English news reports while Turkish interactive discussions and recipes exhibit distinctive language- and culture specific features.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous work
    • 2.1Registers
    • 2.2Turkish
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Data and annotation process
    • 3.2Keyword analysis
  • 4.Findings: Registers of TurCORE
    • 4.1Informational Persuasion (IP)
    • 4.2Narrative (NA)
    • 4.3Informational Description (IN)
    • 4.4Opinion (OP)
    • 4.5How-to/Instructions (HI)
    • 4.6Interactive discussion
  • 5.Findings: Lexical and grammatical analyses
    • 5.1News reports
    • 5.2Interactive discussion
    • 5.3Recipes
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Appendix: Abbreviations in Grammatical Annotations
  • References
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Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Erten-Johansson, Selcen & Veronika Laippala
2025. 33Utilizing Text Dispersion Keyness on Turkish web registers: The case of Informational Description and Opinion. In Exploring digitally-mediated communication with corpora, ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo

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