Conceptual Classification of Mockery and Joke Adjectives in The Turkish Dictionary

Abstract

This study aims to perform a conceptual classification of adjectives with mocking and humorous connotations found in the 12th edition of the Turkish Dictionary published by the Turkish Language Association in 2023. Mockery and joke-related adjectives reflect the speaker’s social attitude and carry implicit, multi-layered meanings that are highly context-dependent. In this respect, they function not only as linguistic elements but also as tools of criticism and humor in social interactions. The study adopts a qualitative research design and employs document analysis as the data collection method. The dataset consists of 18,017 adjectives listed in the Turkish Dictionary, from which 20 adjectives with mocking or humorous connotations were identified and included in the analysis. The data were examined through content analysis, and the identified adjectives were classified based on the 15 main classes and 1,075 subcategories presented in the eighth edition of Roget’s Thesaurus by English linguist Peter Mark Roget. Among the conceptual categories, “Body and the Senses” emerged as the most frequent, followed by “Thought and Reason” and “Volition and Behavior”. The most frequently encountered subcategory was “Physical Strength”. This study demonstrates that adjectives with mocking and humorous connotations in Turkish can be analyzed not only in terms of their lexical meanings but also through their associations with cultural codes and cognitive structures. The conceptual classification method offers a systematic and semantically grounded approach to understanding such adjectives. The findings also suggest that these adjectives serve broader functions in language, reflecting sociocultural perceptions and collective evaluations embedded within the Turkish lexicon.