A Structural and Stylistic Analysis of Turkish Proverbs

Abstract

This study examined Turkish proverbsin terms of structural analysis and proverbial markers to reveal what structures are prominant and how they affect Turkish proverbs. The universe of this study consist of 2667 proverbs and the sample size is determined as 338. The number of samples was obtained according to the total number of proverbs corresponding to each letter and they were selected randomly. The descriptive statistics was used to analyze the data. In syntactic analysis, findings show that tense markers and negation are significantly used. Passive, time/place adverbials and relative clauses are moderately used in the examples. Furthermore, aspect markers and modals are statistically insignificant. Frequently found structures among the categories mentionedare agentless passives, internal negation, present tense, modality morpheme –(y)mE(z) and relative clause –An. Examining grammatical structures, it is remarkably seen that suffixes are much more used rather than words. The reason for this is that suffixes are mostly attached at verbs, and nominal sentences are found less in the samples. Proverbial markers are examined under three categories: sentence type, proverbial devices and sentence function. In those three categories, simple sentences, compound – complex sentences, complex sentences, syntactic parallelism, rhyme, declerative sentencesand imperative sentences are significantly used. Findings also show that syntactic features affect the occurance of the elements of proverbial markers. In complex sentences, subordinate clause often consructed with relative clause suffixes. Also, in complex sentences, sub – clauses are mostly nominal. Most of the metaphors are used in nominal sentences, because it resemblesone thing to another by using the structure X is Y.