Cognitive Study of Polysemy in Simple Adjectives of Azarbaijani Turkish

Abstract

Polysemy is one of the most important issues considered in different schools of linguistics and meaning studies. In this descriptive-documentary study, polysemy in simple adjectives of Azerbaijani Turkish was discussed within the cognitive approach. The data was selected from local journals in Turkish, the Turkish-Persian dictionary of Shahmaresi and the Persian-Azerbaijani dictionary written by Behzadi. Prototypical meanings were based on the results of a researcher-made questionnaire, interview, and the linguistic intuition of the authors. A total of 70 polysemous simple adjectives were identified from the corpuses and a radial network was drawn for each one. Among the cognitive mechanisms of polysemy creation, it was proved that conceptual metaphors would play the greatest role in polysemy creation of all. And, contrary to the traditional view, the connection between the meanings of polysemous adjectives is not accidental, but a systematic relationship exists and can be described by radial categorization. The results, along with complementary studies, can be applied in the field of language teaching, lexicography, more efficient translation machines, increasing the relevance in information retrieval and will be helpful for all experts in the field.

Keywords

• conceptual metaphors
• azerbaijani turkish
• polysemy
• cognitive linguistics
• simple adjective