Linguistic variation beyond the Indo-European web: Analyzing Turkish web registers in TurCORE

Abstract

<p>A register, defined as a text variety with specific situational characteristics and a communicative purpose (Biber & Conrad 2019), is also recognized as a cultural construct (Biber & Egbert 2023). Registers merit thorough investigation due to their pivotal role in reflecting linguistic and cultural landscapes. However, existing studies predominantly focus on Indo-European languages. This study investigates Turkish web registers through the introduction of the Turkish Corpus of Online Registers (TurCORE). Comprising 2,780 web texts, TurCORE was manually annotated using a register taxonomy targeting the entire unrestricted web and identifying 24 web register categories. By employing Text Dispersion Keyword Analysis (Egbert & Biber 2019), the research examines the register characteristics with a specific focus on news reports, interactive discussions, and recipes, drawing comparisons with their English equivalents. Results reveal parallels between Turkish and English news reports while Turkish interactive discussions and recipes exhibit distinctive language- and culture specific features.</p><p><strong>Keywords:</strong> <a href="https://www.jbe-platform.com/search?value1=%27web+registers%27&option1=pub_keyword">web registers</a> ; <a href="https://www.jbe-platform.com/search?value1=%27Turkish%27&option1=pub_keyword">Turkish</a> ; <a href="https://www.jbe-platform.com/search?value1=%27linguistic+analysis+of+web+registers%27&option1=pub_keyword">linguistic analysis of web registers</a> ; <a href="https://www.jbe-platform.com/search?value1=%27Text+Dispersion+Keyword+Analysis%27&option1=pub_keyword">Text Dispersion Keyword Analysis</a> ; <a href="https://www.jbe-platform.com/search?value1=%27manual+register+annotation%27&option1=pub_keyword">manual register annotation</a>.</p>