COGNITIVE COMPLEXES IN TURKISH: METAPHTONYMY

Metaphor and metonymy have been discussed within the scope of figures of speech in literature studies and investigated at lexical level in rhetoric, semantic and hermeneutic approaches. The phenomena of metaphor, which can be defined as “giving a name of an entity to another entity”, and metonymy, which can be defined as “using a word in another sense with a purpose of similarity and relation” have transcended the lexical level with the emergence of Cognitive Grammar in the late 1970’s, and have been discussed with regard to conceptual constructs. While metaphors are defined as processes which match a conceptual field with another conceptual field in Cognitive Grammar, metonymies are defined as matchings between concepts which are in the same conceptual field. The idea that metaphor and metonymy could have an interaction has started to be expressed and Goossens (1990) argued that these two conceptual phenomena formed a conceptual complex which he called “metaphtonymy”. This study aims at investigating this conceptual complex, which we coined as “düzeğretilemece” in Turkish using a database comprising of idioms which include words denoting body parts. The study argues that there is an interaction between metaphor and metonymy in Turkish and the conceptual complex of metaphtonymy is present in Turkish as proposed by Goossens (1990) and Ruiz de Mendoza and Galera-Masegosa (2011).