Assessing Speech Acts of Curses and Prayers in Turkish

Prayer and curse utterances are a significant linguistic form that the addressee expresses his/her inner feelings and attitudes towards the hearer. The semantics of prayer and curses are based on mutually shared background information between hearer and speaker. While some languages have few prayer and curse utterances, other languages, such as Turkish, have abundant prayer and curse expressions that are commonly used in everyday language. The present article delivers a special classification of prayers and curses and analyzes the kind, characteristics and functions of prayer and curse utterances in Turkish by examining specific examples with respect to age, gender and place. Individual interviews were used to collect data from 120 males and females that participated in the study. It was revealed that the females use prayer and curse utterances more frequently than males. Rural people used prayer and curse utterances more often than urban ones.