Turkish Children's Conversational Oppositions: Usage of Two Discourse Markers

Abstract

This study examined how Turkish-speaking preschoolers displayed oppositions in their peer interactions through two adversative discourse markers, ya and ki. These two markers differ in their syntactic mobility. The data came from seminaturalistic peer interactions of 78 preschoolers. The discursive properties of children's utterances with ya and ki were quantitatively and qualitatively analyzed. The analyses suggested that due to the differences in their syntactic mobility, these two discourse markers flagged alternative types of oppositions. Ki, the less mobile marker, was more tightly linked to the propositional content and challenged the relevance of the prior utterance, rather than directly disagreeing with it. Such uses minimized opposition. On the other hand, ya, the more mobile marker, was semantically more independent of the proposition to which it was attached and marked opposition at a more global level. Ya-utterances were mostly in the form of counters, such as ‘Ya stop!’ – ‘Ya stop!’, which escalated conflicts.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to all the children, their teachers, and their parents, who made this study possible.

Notes

¹ These excluded cases are discussed in the section on data reduction.

² The examples of Göksel & Kerslake (2005) were not based on empirical data but were hypothetical, describing Turkish grammar so a comparison between their examples and our examples is not possible.

³ The excerpts presented henceforth are transcribed using the transcription system by Du Bois, Schuetze-Coburn, Cumming, and Paolino (1993). The transcription conventions are summarized in the Appendix.

⁴ Addition of the age, the gender of the child speaker, or the gender composition of the triad (same vs. mixed sex) as fixed factors did not improve the fit of the model (all ps>.05), so they were excluded from the final model for the sake of parsimony.

⁵ One child did not produce any of the discourse markers of interest.