Turkish: A Comprehensive Grammar

Conjunctions, co-ordination and discourse connection 455
28.3.10 ORGANIZATIONAL
This class of connectives provides organizational clues as to how an utterance is to be
understood.
(i) işte has a resumptive or summarizing function. It very often co-occurs with one of
the demonstratives (e.g. bu ‘this’) or their derivatives (e.g. böyle ‘like this’), and is used
to link some previously mentioned item to the speaker’s present statement, which may be
a summary of a longer utterance:
(100) Ortalık karmakanşıktı. Yerlerde gazete kağıtları, kitaplar. Bir gün önce de
evde kızkardeşimin doğum gününü kutlamıştık.
Bulaşık bile daha yıkanmamıştı. İşte karışıklı k derk en bundan söz ediyorum.
The house was in a real mess. Newpapers and books strewn around. The previous
day we had celebrated my sister’s birthday in the flat. Even the dishes hadn’t yet
been washed. Now this is what I mean by a mess.’
In the spoken language the cohesive link provided by işte is often to the visual
environment of the speech situation:
(101) İşte cuma akşamları toplandığımız yer burası.
‘This is the place [that I mentioned earlier] where we gather on Friday evenings.’
Another function of işte can be to indicate that the speaker does not wish to continue
discussion of the topic in question:
(102) Gitmek istemiyorum işte.
‘Well, I don’t want to go.’ (As I have already told you)
(ii) The expressions velhasıl/kısacası/özetle/özet olarak ‘in short’ introduce a summary
of what the speaker has been saying, without the resumptive dimension given by işte:
(103) Karısı yemeklerini yapıyor, çamaşırını yıkayıp ütülüyor, telefonlarına
bakıyor, kısacası hayatını kolaylaştırmak için her şeyi yapıyor.
‘His wife cooks his meals, does his washing and ironing, answers the phone for
him, in short does everything to make his life easy.’
özetlersek/özetleyecek olursak ‘to sum up’ are much more formal alternatives, used in
lectures, etc.
(iii) konumuza dönersek/dönecek olursak ‘to return to our topic’ is used to indicate the
end of a digression, or the intention of bringing the discussion back to what the speaker
wants to talk about.
(iv) As an organizational connective the informal expression neyse ‘well anyway’, ‘oh
well’ expresses the speaker’s feeling that discussion (of a certain topic, or in total) has
gone on long enough, and should be concluded:
(104) Sabah erkenden trene yetişmem gerekiyordu. Kalktım, ortalığı topladım. Bu
arada kediler de yemek istiyorlardı. Bir ara kapıya birisi geldi. Meğer
postacıymış. İmza gerektiren bir paket varmış. Neyse, 8.50 trenine yetişebildim.
‘I had to catch an early train. I got up and tidied the house. Meanwhile the cats
were wanting to be fed. Then someone came to the door. It turned out to be the