A Sociopragmatic Study on Turkish Native Speakers’ Condolence Speech Acts

Abstract

This study explores the speech acts of condolences in Turkish uttered in response to death announcements on Facebook. Methodologically, the first step of this study comprises the analysis of the condolences in Turkish collected from Facebook following Elwood’s (2004) classification of condolence strategies and modifications made by Lotfollahi & Rasekh (2011), Samavarchi & Allami (2012), Behnam et al. (2013), Murad (2013), Janusheva & Neshkovska (2018), Nurlianingsih & Ayu Imperiani (2020) and Alemi et al. (2021). Based on the results of this analysis, common condolence strategies by Turkish native speakers were identified. It was found that most condolence strategies involved statements related to Islam which is the most common religion in Türkiye. The second step of our study involves an experiment in which we tested Turkish native speakers’ assessments of the level of appropriateness of different types of condolences. In doing so, we invited them to assess real-life examples from Facebook. Focusing on the sociolinguistic variables of social distance and the ranking of the imposition, we discussed which factors contributed to the way condolences are expressed in this speech community. “Expression of sympathy” was the only strategy which suggested that most Turkish native speakers noticed the variations in the ranking of the imposition which is the degree of obligation for condoling between the bereaved and the deceased. On the other hand, the ratings of the strategy of “offer of assistance” indicated that most of the informants were aware of the differences in social distance only in the second hypothetical situation where social distance and the ranking of the imposition were low, and the third hypothetical situation where social distance was high, and the ranking of the imposition was low. As such, this study contributes to our knowledge of a relatively understudied type of speech act and its realizations in Turkish culture.