Bir Metin Türü Olarak Düğün Davetiyeleri

Abstract

Wedding ceremonies, which announce the marriage of a couple to the other members of a speech community are universal social practices. And wedding invitations serve the communicative purpose of inviting others to these ceremonies. Such widely circulating texts however, have hardly been subject to linguistic investigation. Çubukçu (2005a) in her sociolinguistic study of Turkish wedding invitations discusses the fuzziness in the discourse of wedding invitations, and suggests that, however short and formulaic these texts may be, they are communicative texts and that they need to be further studied. In line with this opinion, this paper aims to describe wedding invitations as a distinct genre and to identify their generic features with specific focus on the functional-rhetorical categories. To this end, 250 invitations that have been used between 1970 and 2005 (collected by the researcher) were analyzed based on the inductive method employed in studies such as Swales (1990); Bhatia, (1993) and Paltridge (1995) analyzing different genres.