Lexical Profile of a Turkish Sadness Verb Dertlen-: A Corpus Driven Analysis

Abstract

This Study employs a corpus driven approach to analyze the lexical profile of a Turkish verb that communicates sadness which is considered to be a negative emotion. The study focuses on the data obtained from Turkish National Corpus (TNC) within the framework of Extended Lexical Units offered by (Stubbs, 2005). Depending on the concordance lines of the verb dertlen- its syntactic properties, collocational tendencies, context dependent semantic and pragmatic qualifications were identified to understand the probable semantic value of it in terms of cognitive traits of sadness. It was found that dertlen- refers to a sadness which is derived from others’ troubles rather than self-related issues and this finding was discussed within the framework of empathy- altruism hypothesis (Batson,1991). From this respect, the verb gives some clues about the Turkish culture which is characterized with ‘altruistic’ behavior. The study also shows that dertlen- refers to past/present time negativities more frequently when compared to future related sadness concepts. Underlining the validity of corpus-driven approaches, the corpus data demonstrated that this sadness verb has its own cognitive patterns and this schematic nature of dertlen- dictates a particular linguistic environment which also shapes semantic and pragmatic load of the verb. Finally, thanks to this research, we were able to place dertlen- correctly inside Scherer's (2001) cognitive evaluation patterns for sadness.