Metaphors in Address Terms of Azeri Turkish Language

Abstract

Using metaphorical address terms to represent sentiments and feelings is an important subject in studying societies. This research aims to study this sociolinguistic phenomenon from a cognitive perspective and has three objectives: finding types and frequencies of conceptual metaphors, their rate of occurrence in address terms used by the two age groups of young and middle-aged women and men, and the amount of metaphorical address terms among all kinds in Azeri Turkish of Khoy. The study employed content analysis and data are collected by field study from 100 native speakers using a questionnaire. Statistics indicated that following the classification of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), frequencies of metaphorical address terms in relation with each other were structural metaphors (267) cases, ontological metaphors (212) cases and orientational metaphors (3) cases. Findings indicated that: 1) the greatest amount of using metaphorical address terms belonged respectively to young women (%39.17), young men (%28.22), middle-aged men (%19.30) and middle-aged women (%13.31), 2) out of the total number of obtained address terms, (%55.1) were related to metaphorical and (%44.9) to non-metaphorical address terms. We can thus conclude that more than half of addresses in Khoy have a metaphorical nature.

Keywords

• cognitive linguistics
• conceptual metaphor
• address terms
• mapping
• azeri turkish