Abstract:

Historical discourse analysis, which can be regarded as part of discourse analysis, aims at describing the potential changes observed in linguistic structures used in texts over time. The aims of this study are to describe embedded clauses (namely, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, complement clauses) used in the government programs published in the period of 1923-1949 in terms of their distribution and the suffixes used and to reveal the changes over their use and structures following a historical discourse analysis approach. In addition, the study aims at making a comparison between thirty-seven goverment programs produced between 1950 and 1999 and those published in the period of 1923-1949 based on embedded clauses. The corpus of the study includes a total of eighteen goverment programs, which were taken from the website of Turkish National Assembly. First the embedded clauses used were identified and they were classified depending on the embedded clause type. Their distribution and percentage based on these types were determined. Then, the suffixes used in each embedded clause type were identfied and their frequency and percentage were found. The findings of the study indicate that it is the relative clauses, which have the highest percentage among three embedded clause types. It is followed by multifunctional adverbial clauses and complement clauses. These embedded clauses are used for certain goals in the texts and they are mostly used to expand the informative feature of the goverment programs. The other major function of these embedded clauses is to make both noun phrases and verb phrases much more detailed. The comparison of the government programs from different periods showed that relative clauses are the most frequently used type of embedded clauses. It is followed by adverbial clauses except for one period, 1950-1960. Complement clauses less used in contrast to other two embedded clause types. Based on these findings it can be stated that government programs have unique and distinctive textual features

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