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Title: A cross-cultural study on white colour idioms in Turkish and English: conceptual metaphor theory in focus

 

Vol. 2, 2017, pp. 8-20.

DOI: 10.46687/SILC.2017.v02.001

 

Author: Gökçen Hastürkoğlu

About the author: Gökçen Hastürkoğlu is an assistant professor doctor at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of English Translation and Interpretation, Atılım University, Ankara, Turkey. After completing her undergraduate degree at Hacettepe University, Translation and Interpretation Department, she has earned her MA in the field ofEnglish Language and Literature. She has completed her PhD in the field of EnglishLinguistics. Her research interests are translation pedagogy, cognitive linguistics, medical translation, translation of children’s literature, and translation criticism. She has published in internationally-indexed publications such as Australian Journal of Linguistics, Research in Language, Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT, Journal of Language and Linguistic Studies, International Journal of Languages Education and Teaching, and as well as many national refereed journals.

e-mail: gokcen.hasturkoglu@atilim.edu.tr

ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0219-7850

 

Citation (APA style): Hastürkoğlu, G. (2017). A cross-cultural study on white colour idioms in Turkish and English: conceptual metaphor theory in focus. Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT, 2, 8-20. doi: 10.46687/SILC.2017.v02.001

 

Link:

https://silc.fhn-shu.com/images/issues/2017/SILC_2017_2_008-020_13_EN.pdf

 

Abstract: This study aims at investigating how similar and different the embodied cognition of Turkish and English speakers is by providing a systematic description of Turkish and English white colour idiomatic expressions and by analyzing them within the framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory through which the cognitive motivations behind the idiomatic expressions can be demonstrated. In order to do so, a large-scale corpus study based on specialized dictionaries on idioms in Turkish and English was carried out and a table was presented for each language illustrating the idiomatic expression, its meaning, its translation for the Turkish part, and the underlying conceptual metaphor or metonymy. After this cognitive analysis, it was revealed that despite some similarities in the cognitive mappings of the idioms in Turkish and English, the connotations of white colour idioms in two genetically unrelated languages vary because of cultural, historical, religious, or customary matters.

Key words: white colour, idiomatic expressions, conceptual metaphor, conceptual metonymy, cultural cognition

 

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