Abstract

The language used in literary works falls in the field of study of many disciplines. Function and meaning analyses of language elements such as words, phrases, sentences in the works constitute the basic data in order to make studies in the fields of history, culture, sociology, etc. It is possible to obtain information about the period when the work was written through the style, which is accepted as the special language of the author or poet. The subject of this study is the analysis of the language elements in the novel titled <em>Onikiler</em>, serialized in Cumhuriyet newspaper in 1935, with the announcement of <em>Great Folk Novel </em>by Sermet Muhtar Alus In the novel, the event takes place in Istanbul in 1886, and it vividly reflects many elements of Istanbul's streets, social life, relations between men and women, bureaucracy, and beliefs at that time. This vividness is strengthened by the fact that direct conversations are included in a large part of the novel and by the transfer of these conversations and the language spoken on the street to the novel. In the study, all the words in the work were analyzed. It is seen that the words in the spoken language of the period in the novel have different references from the meanings we encounter in the written language. These uses can be classified as follows in terms of form and meaning: a) Verbs and verb stems, which are present in the written language and differ in terms of meaning, are commonly encountered in the work. Some of these derivations and combinations have occurred as a result of the words transferred from foreign languages undergoing changes depending on the structure of our language. b) There are words that have a figurative meaning through concretization by associating them with entities, objects, events, etc. in nature. c) There are expressions conveyed using reverse discourse. d) Sentence-level uses in formulaic words are of verbal expression value in terms of both the inverted sentence order and the meaning attributed to the words. When this classification is evaluated, it is seen that there are rich examples of the spoken language of the period in which the event took place in the novel. One of the important points is that the words in the novel have a wide range of meanings. These meaning areas can be a reflection of the richness of the spoken language. In addition, the presence of people of all religions and races in Istanbul at that time was a factor in the introduction of words of foreign origin into the language. In the novel, foreign words belonging to social life, tailoring, male-female relations, etc. were included, or these borrowed words were used by changing according to Turkish phonetic characteristics. As a result, it is important to create the complete works of the novels that speak to/describe the public in Turkish literature, to make language studies, to classify and analyze the vocabulary, in terms of revealing the rich vocabulary of the Turkish Language and contributing to the current vocabulary.