General Nouns in Turkish: Woman and Man

Abstract

The rst aim of the research is to dene whether the words woman and man, whose frequencies are high in the corpus, are general nouns in Turkish. The second aim is to describe the textual patterns of the general nouns, woman and man, in terms of person types, structural and functional aspects. This study is based on the study of Mahlberg on English General Nouns, which follows the cohesion theory of Halliday and Hasan. The words woman and man, which are frequent in the Turkish National Corpus (TNC) (Aksan et.al) are analysed following a corpus-driven method. Our corpus is a 3 million Word corpus (Atasoy) consisting of the language data through the years between 2005 and 2009, which is derived from the TNC. The data is analysed through CQPweb (Hardie). The analyses show that the words woman and man in Turkish are general nouns which appear in certain textual patterns. Even though these words have similarities, they also have differences, which distinguish them.

Keywords

• Genel Adlar
• Derlem Dilbilim
• Türkçe Ulusal Derlemi (TUD)