THE VERB BAKMAK ‘TO LOOK’ AND ITS DISCOURSE FUNCTIONS: CORPUS CONCORDANCES

The verb of perception bakmak ‘to look’ in Turkish, as with similar other verbs in other languages, has undergone semantic bleaching. The result is the frequent use of the verb of perception with a function of a discourse marker that calls for attention. In a pioneering work, Ruhi (2011) cites uses of 2nd person singular imperative forms of bakmak in Turkish spoken discourse (bak, bak-sana) and identifies their uses for catching attention and emphasizing a point. She further notes that the volitional forms of the same verb (bak-ayım and bak-alım) also serve to indicate a pre-sequence to a leave taking and topic closure. This paper will extract corpus citation of imperative forms from a larger corpus of contemporary Turkish called Turkish National Corpus (TNC) and will review the interjection functions of these forms in their contexts of use.