Research Information System
Thesis Type: Postgraduate
Institution Of The Thesis: Uludağ Üniversitesi, Turkey
Approval Date: 2009
Thesis Language: English
Student: EYLEM YEŞİLYURT
Supervisor: ÇİĞDEM KARATEPE
Abstract:Linguists have been debating the notion of indirectness and politeness for over 30 years however a fair amount of research in the recent literature on indirect language has focused on speech acts. The purpose of this thesis is to explore several aspects of indirect language use during daily conversation. More specifically, it investigates indirect language use in coffee cup reading practices which are among common communication situations in Eastern cultures like Turkish. It argues that Turkish coffee cup readers use indirect language as a means of rapport management. It investigates the use of indirect language as a means of rapport-building in 12 coffee cup reading recordings the total length of which is approximately 113 minutes. Participants are two male and 19 female, 10 of whom were fortune-tellers and 11 are those whose fortune is read via coffee cup. The recordings were fully transcribed. The indirect utterances were classified according to their functions.Analysis of the data reveals nine categories of indirect utterances: (1) standard language: idiomatic expressions and routines, (2) metaphors and stereotypes, (3) questions and tag questions, (4) discourse particles and fillers, (5) probability expressions and lexical hedges, (6) quantifiers and intensifiers, (7) indefinite source of proposition, (8) conjunctions, (9) conditionals. It appears that our participants frequently use these indirect utterances. The results seem to meet our prediction and support the idea that indirect language appears to be employed quite frequently to both establish and manage rapport in interaction during coffee cup reading sessions.