On Morphosyntactic Patterns of Cohesion in Azeri Turkish Narrative

Abstract

This study aims to apply Halliday’s (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) concept of cohesion using Dooley and Levinsohn’s (2001) model of morphosyntactic pattern to Azeri Turkish narratives in an attempt to uncover narrative and morphosyntactic pattern relation. The corpus contains eleven short stories in Azeri Turkish. Findings of the study revealed that echoic utterance as a subtype of the morphosyntactic pattern may be used to mark the narrative peak. Also, there is a violation of morphosyntactic pattern in the corpus. This violation uses the historical present to draw the audience into a climatic situation. The study shows that echoic utterances can be regarded as links in a chain, functioning like cohesive ties in the text. The pragmatic notion, dramatic development, narrative peak, meaning construction, and implicature are also expressed by echoic utterances. Moreover, these discourse-pragmatic structuring constituents have been found to appear at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of narratives to provide a basis for relating a sentence to its context or mental representation, make the hearer accompany the narrator during the whole story and maintain the unity of the narrative.

Keywords

• discourse
• azeri turkish language
• narrative
• cohesion
• functional linguistics
• morphosyntactic pattern