Yeşim Aksan

No Wellness Feels Better than This Sickness: Love Metaphors from a Cross-Cultural Perspective

This paper investigates love metaphors from the cross-cultural perspective of two typologically unrelated languages—English and Turkish. It categorizes Turkish love metaphors following the conceptual models proposed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) and Kövecses (1988, 2000). Turkish data provide added support to the claims of conceptual metaphor theory that force and path image schemas are universal, but not always uniform as observed specifically in culturally different realizations of LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor in English and Turkish. This study also identifies specific level abstract source domains in Turkish, which do not appear in the English data: “PAIN/SUFFERING,” “INEFFABILITY,” and “DEADLY FORCE.” The sociocultural motivation for these domains is illustrated with reference to medieval Anatolian Sufi philosophy and traditions.

Corpus Frequency and Affix Ordering in Turkish

Suffix sequences in agglutinative languages derive complex structures. Based on frequency information from a corpus data, this study will present emerging multi-morpheme sequences in Turkish. Morphgrams formed by combination of voice suffixes with other verbal suffixes from finite and non-finite templates are identified in the corpus. Statistical analyses are conducted on permissible combinations of these suffixes. The findings of the study have implications for further studies on morphological processing in agglutinative languages.

Linguistic Corpora: A View from Turkish

Usage-based linguistic studies have gained new insights as corpus-based and corpus-driven analyses have advanced in recent years. Linguists working in different domains have turned to corpora as a major source in their study of language at all levels of representation. Currently, corpus linguistics is evolving into a sophisticated methodology in extracting and analyzing data. Building and using corpora in Turkish linguistics is a recent undertaking, initially motivated by work on natural language processing (NLP) research. The number of available corpora is increasing and linguistic research has come to test hypotheses on attested data, or uncover more lexical and grammatical patterns of use that have gone unnoticed in the absence of corpus data. Advances in NLP research and tools provided for corpus building and annotation further contribute to corpus studies in Turkish linguistics.