HALKBİLİM VE KÜLTÜRDİLBİLİMİN KESİŞİMİNDE BİR KÜLTÜR KONSEPTİ: “AYIP”
THE CULTURAL CONCEPT OF ‘AYIP’ AT THE CROSSROADS OF FOLKLORE AND CULTURAL LINGUISTICS

Summary/Abstract: The fact that a nation's language acts as a carrier of its culture demonstrates that languages are far more than more communication tools. Language not only preserves history, traditions, customs, and value systems but also ensures their transmission from generation to generation, making it a nation's most precious treasure. The mystery inherent in Turkish— which carries the töre (social norms/customary law) of the Turkish people and ensures its continuity—is embedded within its linguistic signs. For this reason, the concept referred to by ethnolinguistics as a "cultural concept" is of close concern to the field of folklore, which examines töre in a broad sense. The fact that language carries the values of its society and contains signs specific to that society's value judgments explains why certain concepts termed "cultural concepts" in ethnolinguistics lack direct equivalents in other languages. The cultural concept of "ayıp" serves as an example of this situation.The aim of this study is to examine the cultural concept of "ayıp", which is an indicator of taboos in Turkish traditions, customs, and value judgments, within the context where folklore and ethnolinguistics intersect. In this study, conducted in accordance with qualitative research methods, document analysis was initially employed as the data collection technique. Based on the premise that the word "ayıp" is a concept in ethnolinguistics, its semantic fields in Turkish were researched through various dictionaries and literary works. Subsequently, an online free association experiment was conducted to understand what the cultural concept of "ayıp" signifies for Generation X (born 1965-1979), Generation Y (born 1980-1999), and Generation Z (born 2000 and later), and to track the semantic shifts and transformations of this cultural concept across different generations. A total of 307 participants from various generations took part in the survey. The goal of this survey is to identify the transformations related to the cultural concept of "ayıp" in Turkish society by examining intergenerational changes within its semantic field.

• Details
• Contents