Polysemy of Ablative Case in Turkish: An Application within the Framework of Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

Cognitive linguistics, which argues that language progresses on a simultaneous acceleration rather than consisting of independent modules, defines these commonalities through polysemy and metaphorical structures. In this context, polysemy and metaphorical structures, which are handled through content words in the traditional approach, also focus on function words and dependent morphemes in both semantic and grammatical contexts within the scope of cognitive linguistics. In this study, it is aimed to discuss the polysemy in spatial and non-spatial contexts in the [-DAn] morpheme, which encodes the ablative case in Turkish. In the study, prototype sense, image schematic transformations, peripheral extensions and metaphorical structures were demonstrated. The database of the research using the descriptive survey model consists of 3222 dependent index lines obtained through the Turkish National Corpus 3.0. In the research, it is concluded that the polysemy conditions of the ablative case in Turkish are determined by 10 different spatial image schematic transformations such as ORIENTATION, TRANSFER, PERCEPTION, related to the prototype sense, 3 peripheral extensions; 9 different non-spatial image schematic transformations and 3 peripheral extensions.

Keywords

• ablative case
• polysemy
• spatial
• non-spatial
• image schema
• metaphor
• cognitive linguistics