Reference to Self in Turkish: Implications for Cognitive and Cultural Linguistics

Languages studied to date show evidence of conceptual metaphors, lexemes, and semi-formulaic structures for narrativizing self-reference in discourse. Self-reference has been found to distinguish between the self as subject ‘I’ and the self as ‘object’ of the discourse in the embodiment paradigm in cognitive linguistics, such that a split-self cultural schema has been proposed for several languages (see Lakoff, 1997; Kövecses, 2005; Pan, 2005). In this paper, we carry out a study on expressions that are related to this category of self-reference (e.g., içimden bir ses diyor ki) to unravel the conceptual metonymic and metaphorical schemas of self-reference in Turkish discourse. The purpose of the study is to test whether the split-self schema is applicable to the narrativization of self in Turkish. The findings reveal that distancing between self-aspects is a less prominent schema in Turkish discourse. This finding is interpreted within the conceptual metonymy of gönül in standard Turkish. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research in cognitive and cultural linguistics concerning the conceptualization of self in Turkish.   Keywords: Subject and Self, The Split-self Schema, (partitive) Self-reference, Metadiscursive Frames, Cognitive Metonymy, gönül.

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Languages studied to date show evidence of conceptual metaphors, lexemes, and semi-formulaic structures for narrativizing self-reference in discourse. Self-reference has been found to distinguish between the self as subject ‘I’ and the self as ‘object’ of the discourse in the embodiment paradigm in cognitive linguistics, such that a split-self cultural schema has been proposed for several languages (see Lakoff, 1997; Kövecses, 2005; Pan, 2005). In this paper, we carry out a study on expressions that are related to this category of self-reference (e.g., içimden bir ses diyor ki) to unravel the conceptual metonymic and metaphorical schemas of self-reference in Turkish discourse. The purpose of the study is to test whether the split-self schema is applicable to the narrativization of self in Turkish. The findings reveal that distancing between self-aspects is a less prominent schema in Turkish discourse. This finding is interpreted within the conceptual metonymy of gönül in standard Turkish. The paper concludes with suggestions for further research in cognitive and cultural linguistics concerning the conceptualization of self in Turkish.

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