CURRENT ISSUE

A Qualitative Study on the Representation of Stuttering in Turkish National Corpus

Şevket Özdemir Sevinç Tüysüz
Abstract

Purpose: There is a need to understand how stuttering is perceived among the public. The examination of any available corpora is one of the options to address this need. Following a recent study using corpora to examine stuttering coverage in newspaper media in the United States, the current study aims to reveal the contextual use of stuttering in Turkish National Corpus (TNC) 3.0.

Method: A simple search query (“kekeme*”) was entered into TNC, formed and designed as a general corpus with a total of 50 million words. While the Turkish term “kekeme” literally translates to “stutterer”, its use as a standalone noun is discouraged in clinical and academic contexts in Türkiye to prioritize person-first language (e.g. “person who stutters”). Due to the agglutinative nature of the Turkish language, the authors used “kekeme*” with the asterisk attached to encompass its various morphosyntactic derivations within the corpus. The data were the results of this query within the written texts that covered 98% of the corpus encompassing a 20-year timeframe (1990-2009). Following further analysis of the initial search result, a total of 280 occurrences was considered and analyzed through content analysis.

Results: Two themes and 20 codes emerged: Research on stuttering (e.g., theories of stuttering onset and development; prevalence, experience, definition, course, and multifaceted impacts of stuttering; suggestions on how to manage stuttering and approach people who stutter (PWS), etc.), and literary fiction and non-fiction (e.g., stigmatization of the PWS, stuttering as a figure of speech, “ideal occupation” for PWS; information about stuttering onset and development, etc.).

Conclusion: The information derived from the contextual use of stuttering was both consistent and inconsistent with the findings of previous literature. Therefore, the use of a corpus might hold the potential to bridge the gap between various perspectives on fluency disorders.

Keywords

stuttering, Turkish National Corpus, fluency disorders, qualitative content analysis

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