The use of Arabic cognate estağfurullah in Turkish language as a discourse marker: A corpus driven research

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the use of Arabic cognate estağfurullah as a discourse marker in Turkish language. Estağfurullah in Turkish is mainly used by an interlocutor to show courtesy and modesty when s/he is appreciated or thanked. After examining the naturally occurring text of written data through a corpus-based qualitative research using the Turkish National Corpus (TNC), the frequency occurrences of estağfurullah, its syntactic location and functions were identified. Its distributions were analyzed through blending of one-to-one searching and sifting methods. Its query returned 234 hits in 112 different naturally occurring texts of written data. In more than half of the hits (143), it was found that estağfurullah was mostly used in the initial position of an utterance with various collocations. What is more, it was used for different interactional functions ranging from showing courtesy and modesty, statement of agreement/disagreement or religion to expressing affective states; anger and helplessness, taking an offence and face-saving act.