DON’T BELIEVE IT, DON’T BE WITHOUT IT: METAPHORS RELATED TO THE CONCEPT OF “FORTUNE-TELLING” IN TURKISH

From a cognitive perspective, it is accepted that conceptual metaphors play an important role in shaping our daily language (Lakoff Johnson, 1980). Conceptual metaphors play an important role in establishing cultural differences specific to languages; such that when investigating the culture-specific features of certain concepts, conceptual metaphors can present important language-specific clues (Kövecses, 2010; Kövecses, 2005; Lakoff; 1993). This study aims to investigate the conceptualization of “fortune-telling” in Turkish using a cognitive linguistics view and a corpus based approach. To reach this aim, the Turkish National Corpus (TNCv3) was queried for the word fortune-telling and the metaphors relating to the concept of fortune-telling were listed. Afterwards, this data was examined and interpreted. The findings of the study show that fortune-telling is conceptualized in the source domains of CONCRETE ENTITY, OBJECT, HUMAN, BELIEF and CONTAINER.