Polysemy of the Postposition içinde in Turkish: An Analysis within the Framework of Cognitive Linguistics

Abstract

Cognitive linguistics, which places form and meaning in an integrated and relational scheme, considers polysemy as a natural and inherent feature of language. Thus, function words, which are examined on the grammatical level in the traditional view, can also be researched with from a meaning-based perspective through different dynamics. The aim of this study is to reveal the polysemy properties of the postposition içinde within the framework of the cognitive linguistics paradigm, and to reveal the inter-scene relations within the scope of image schematic transformations, extensions, and metaphorical constructions. The dataset of the research, which has a descriptive nature, consists of 3500 concordances obtained through the Turkish National Corpus 3.0 corpus query, which includes the contextual views of the postposition. As a result, the postposition içinde is observed with four different image schema transformations related to the containment prototype extension, it also has four different peripheral extensions, and different semantic networks are obtained by adding metaphorical interpretations to the image schemas.

Keywords

• polysemy
• image schema
• metaphor
• extension
• içinde