Corpus-driven lexical profiles of the turkish synonym set sadece, yalnızca and yalnız

Abstract

This is a corpus-driven study based on the TNCv3.0 to identify lexical profiles of the synonym set of Turkish exclusive adverbials sadece, yalnızca and yalnız within the framework of the Model of Extended Lexical Units (Stubbs, 2002). From the concordances of the adverbials, their contextdependent semantic, pragmatic and syntactic properties, co-occurrence tendencies, and synonymity levels were identified. It was found that sadece and yalnızca have a high contextual and collocational equinormality and are completely intersubstitutable and complete synonyms (Lyons, 1981) with yalnızca used less frequently. Yalnız is polysemous and multifunctional and has a sense synonymy relation with the others only when it means only. Even in the sense of only, yalnız was found to be rarely used in certain lexical bundles the other adverbials form. Yalnız was also found to have a topic shifter function. In contexts in which yalnız means only, the three adverbials are cognitive synonyms (Cruse, 1986).