Metaphorical and Metonymical Heart in Turkish: Kalp and Yürek

Abstract

Traditionally, the notion of metaphor has been conceived as a figure of speech used in poetry and prose so far. In Lakoffian paradigm, however, metaphors are not confined to literary language; they are located in everyday language and they shape the way one conceptualizes a mental domain via another. Thus, abstract concepts like life, time, state, change are expressed metaphorically (Lakoff, 1993). In this study, metaphors and metonyms of kalp and yürek frequently used in colloquial Turkish are dealt within the abovementioned theoretical framework, and even though the two words are known as synonyms, what kinds of similarities and differences exist between their metaphorical and metonymical uses are put forth. Data were collected from METU Turkish Written Corpus (Say, Zeyrek, Oflazer, Özge, 2004), a Turkish monolingual dictionary and two Turkish dictionaries of idioms and proverbs. Findings indicate that the concept of yürek is used far more frequently than kalp in metaphors and metonyms, and that one is not replaced with another in some contexts. What this difference may result from was partially interpreted in the study; nevertheless, more research on spoken corpora and folkloric works in particular could be necessary.