Abstract

This study investigates the cultural conceptualization of congratulatory happy events in British English and Turkish and discusses them cross-culturally. A lexical search was carried out in various corpora from the newspaper genre using the verbs congratulate in English and its dictionary counterparts tebrik etmek and kutlamak in Turkish along with their various lexical forms, which not only report the act of congratulating but also perform it. The results of the study showed that there were cultural differences and similarities in the conceptualization of congratulatory happy events. It was found that there were subtle differences between the events of tebrik etmek and kutlamak in the Turkish data and that the Turkish tebrik etmek was closer to congratulating although congratulating events were relatively more restricted. This study contributes to the socio-cultural dimension of congratulating and provides a cross-cultural understanding of congratulatory happy events with implications for foreign language education and intercultural communication.