Ahmet Demirtaş

Keywords: Contemporary Azerbaijani Turkish, metonymy, word ürek/yürek, semantics, linguistics

Abstract

Metonymy, one of the rhetoric showing a language's sophistication and richness, has an important place in vocabulary. It is created by using a word with its unreal meaning without cherishing metaphor. It is seen that the words gain new meanings through the metonymy, which result in development and expansion of vocabulary.Word combinations are divided into two groups in Azerbaijani Turkish: Phrase, in which the words keep their original meaning and metaphrase, in which the merged words shape a new meaning as a whole. Metaphrases are used to express all kinds of feelings and thoughts. The metonymies are formed to express a variety of emotions and thoughts by using the word, ürek/yürek, in contemporary Azerbaijan Turkish. While some of these metonymies express to love, to connect, to be in love, and to like based on loving and manifestation of love, some others state sadness and sorrow in various dimensions. Several of the metonymies articulate the feelings related to courage, fear, distress, hate, and concerns; and expressing the mind and mind related actions and certain situations such as to forget/unable to forget, to remember/unable to remember, to think, to understand, and to suspect. Some metonymies are formed by using the word, ürek/yürek, to express the cases related to human body parts such as to be thirsty, to be hungry, to get weak, to lose weight, to faint, to make (someone) weak, and to die. There are also metonymies describing and related to digestive organs namely to feel nauseous and to turn one's stomach.In this study, the metonymies formed by "ürek/yürek" found in contemporary Azerbaijani Turkish vocabulary are scrutinized and focused