The Strategies of Invitation Speech Act in Turkish

This study examines the strategies on invitation speech act in Turkish based on the speech act theory in pragmatics which fundamentally positions that when people use language they actually perform a kind of action. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the strategies employed on invitation speech act by native speakers of Turkish. To accomplish the goal, an online Written Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was employed with an aim to delineate the strategies Turkish speakers use while inviting. Another method was examining several different Turkish television series. Following the implication of the quantitative technique of conversation analysis, the utterances in data from invitation acts were analyzed in terms of the patterns of the semantic formulas categorized in the taxonomy by Suzuki (2009). The findings of the study revealed that invitation acts used in Turkish have their unique patterns. Direct invitations (84.90%) were more frequent than indirect ones (15.09%). Moreover, the most predominant type of head act was declarative (40.33%) and query on hearer’s plan (17.64%) had the highest frequency among preparatory acts. The most common supportive move was description of event by 48.44% of Turkish invitations.