The semantic aspects of Turkish dimension adjectives yüksek (high) and alçak (low)
Abstract
Lexical meaning is not limited to the meaning found in the dictionary; it also involves encyclopedic meaning, which presents knowledge of a society’s culture and ways of thinking (Fillmore, 1975; Langacker, 1987). Research based on cognitive approaches underscores the role of the semantic component of language and acknowledges that it is important for understanding all other components. Particularly in lexical semantics research, theories and principles of cognitive linguistics have a determinant role. Lexical meaning is an outcome of our conceptualization. For this study, we sought to analyze the semantic aspects of the Turkish dimension adjectives yüksek (high) and alçak (low) with corpus data by referring to the Turkish National Corpus (TNC). Thus, we examined the Turkish adjectives yüksek/alçak+noun combinations in the TNC and revealed the distribution of these adjectives’ semantic aspects, as well as the types of noun constructions in which these adjectives occur. According to the results, the most frequently used adj+noun constructions in Turkish are in the domains of ENTITY, DEGREE, and CIRCUMSTANCES. In addition, the semantic aspects of yüksek/alçak+noun constructions display a continuum from literal to figurative meanings involving metonymic, metaphtonymic, and metaphoric uses.
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