A diachronic ecolinguistic analysis of the transitivity system in Turkish government programs
Language Sciences, cilt.118, 2026 (AHCI, SSCI, Scopus)
- Yayın Türü: Makale / Tam Makale
- Cilt numarası: 118
- Basım Tarihi: 2026
- Doi Numarası: 10.1016/j.langsci.2026.101868
- Dergi Adı: Language Sciences
- Derginin Tarandığı İndeksler: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Scopus, Index Islamicus, Linguistic Bibliography, MLA - Modern Language Association Database, Psycinfo, MLA International Bibliography
- Anahtar Kelimeler: Corpus-assisted discourse studies, Diachronic corpus studies, Ecolinguistic discourse analysis, Environment, Transitivity system, Turkish government programs
- Hacettepe Üniversitesi Adresli: Evet
Özet
The aim of this study is to determine the frequency of environment-related words such as forests, trees, soil and seafood in Turkish government programs issued from 1923 to 2016. Utilizing the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study focuses on the transitivity system, examining the types of processes, participant roles and circumstantial depictions of these words to understand how these are represented in these texts. The corpus analysis produced 193 environment-related statements, 97 keywords and 3480 environment-related words. The findings illustrate that the inclusion of environment-related topics becomes systematic in government programs from the 1960s. Environment-related statements are mostly expressed in material processes, but relational and mental processes are also used to communicate them, albeit less commonly. The most frequent participant role of these elements is found to be that of Goal while Purpose is their most frequent circumstantial expression. Diachronic analysis demonstrates that the processes, participant roles and circumstantial representations of environment-related terms exhibit a variation across six periods covered in the corpus. In this regard, the period between 1923 and 1950 considerably differs from the other periods in terms of the distribution of components of the transitivity system. The study illustrates that changes in frequencies reflect differences in the representation and conceptualization of environment-related terms in official discourse.