Utilizing Text Dispersion Keyness on Turkish web registers: The case of Informational Description and Opinion

Abstract

<p>Registers, such as news reports, frequently asked questions (FAQs), and opinion blogs, serve as indicators of linguistic variation that reflect the linguistic characteristics of digital environments. Understanding registers occurring on the web, known as web registers, is crucial in today’s digital age. However, despite the abundance of linguistic data available on the internet, a notable gap in knowl edge regarding the origins and the linguistic analyses of web registers remains. This especially applies to less-explored non-Indo-European languages. This study focuses on the Turkish web, drawing data from the Turkish Corpus of Online Regis ters (TurCORE) (Erten-Johansson et al. 2024). The linguistic characteristics of the Informational Description register comprising 481 texts and the Opinion register comprising 215 texts were examined using Text Dispersion Keyword Analysis (Egbert and Biber 2019). The findings highlight disparities not only in discoursal but also in linguistic features between the two registers. Moreover, notable varia tions in linguistic characteristics were found within each register, notwithstanding their shared objective or subjective discourse. By shedding light on the similarities of and differences between the characteristics of these registers, particularly within the context of a less studied non-Indo-European language, this research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of language use in the digi tal environment.</p><p>Keywords: web registers, linguistic variation, Turkish Corpus of Online Registers (TurCORE), register analysis, Informational Description, Opinion, Text Dispersion Keyword Analysis.</p>