SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF THE TURKISH DISCOURSE PARTICLE HELE: A CORPUS-DRIVEN STUDY IN LEXICAL PROFILING

The present study investigates the Turkish discourse particle hele, commonly used especially in spoken Turkish, in terms of its semantic and pragmatic uses in naturally occurring language. All analyses are based on attested data obtained from Turkish National Corpus (demo version). This corpus-driven study is thus naturally a product of an inductive undertaking. First, the common senses and corpus-driven pragmatic functions of the discourse particle hele are determined and further analyzes are carried out to derive its lexical profile from a variety of contexts of use. To this end, hele’s common collocation patterns hele o, hele şu, hele bir and hele bir de are analyzed in their contexts and then basic observations on its colligations, semantic preference and semantic prosody are presented. The comparison of the senses and functions that the online reference dictionary of Turkish Language Association provides for hele to the patterns of use determined in this study indicates clearly the important role of corpus data in clarification of the senses and functions of a word.