A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of Dedikodu and Gıybet in Turkish

Abstract

This study compares the frequency, connotations and collocations of the words dedikodu and gıybet in Turkish. Turkish National Corpus and Spoken Turkish Corpus were utilized as the data source. Frequency analysis reveals that dedikodu is more frequently used compared to gıybet and several formulaic expressions were observed for dedikodu. With regards to the domains, gıybet is only used in written discourse and mostly in religious sources whereas dedikodu was observed in a variety of domains including prose, biography, scientific and non-scientific sources. Based on the discourse analysis that was carried out by a meticulous analysis and coding of the contexts of each occurrence, remarkable connotational differences were found out between dedikodu and gıybet. These words were also analysed with reference to their semantic prosody by an examination of their collocations. Collocational analysis unveils that gıybet always co-occurs with negative words. Although mostly negative, dedikodu is collocated with both positive and negative words.