PRAGMATIC FUNCTIONS OF ‘PARDON’ IN TURKISH CORPUS

Abstract

This corpus-based study aims at investigating the pragmatic uses of the word ‘pardon’in Turkish. Concordance lines from Turkish National Corpus (i.e., TNCv.3) wereanalyzed and categorized in terms of the pragmatic and discourse functions of theword pardon. The findings reveal that the lexical meaning of pardon is extended intoseveral illocutionary functions in addition to its dictionary definition: a light apology,self-repair, soft opposition, taking attention, interruption, request for repetition andmetonymic use of fault/forgiveness. The quantitative findings demonstrate thatpardon is more frequently used as a discourse marker than an apology form. The studyshows how a single lexeme may gain different functions in language use independentof its original semantic content, and corpora provide invaluable data fordiscourse/pragmatic analyses.