Plant-themed metaphors in Turkish proverbs: A cognitive approach

Plants play an unneglectable role in human-life; therefore, they are among the most used concrete items that the human mind takes advantage of while understanding abstract concepts. The aim is to find out how Turkish people conceptualize plant-themed metaphors in Turkish proverbs. To this end, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by Lakoff & Johnson (1980) was adopted. 2.298 proverbs contain plant-themed concepts. Based on the data, the plant-themed concepts are listed in a Table with their English translations. The most frequent concepts are found to be AĞAÇ (TREE), BAĞ (VINEYARD), GÜL (ROSE), HARMAN (THRESHING), OT (WEED); hence, these concepts were chosen. First, possible socio-economical and culture-specific justifications for the salience of each concept were investigated. For each metaphorical concept, twenty proverbs were used for target domain detection. In total, one hundred proverbs were examined. The proverbs were also analyzed by an interrater. Using the Miles-Hubermann reliability coefficient (1994), the source-target match's reliability was calculated. At this stage, the Cohen's Kappa Test (1960) was employed to analyze the reliability. Kappa values are found to be 0.73. The attributes denoted to each plant-themed concept were classified as negative, positive or neutral. The conceptual metaphors identified through the analysis are as follows: AĞAÇ İNSANDIR (TREE IS HUMAN), BAĞ MÜLKTÜR (VINEYARD IS PROPERTY), BAĞ EMEKTİR (VINEYARD IS WORK), BAĞ İSTENDİK SONUÇTUR (VINEYARD IS FAVORABLE OUTCOME), BAĞ AİLEDİR (VINEYARD IS FAMILY), GÜL GÜZELLİKTİR (ROSE IS BEAUTY), HARMAN DEĞERLİ VARLIKTIR (THRESHING IS VALUABLE POSSESSION), HARMAN ZAMANDIR (THRESHING IS TIME), HARMAN BOLLUKTUR (THRESHING IS ABUNDANCY), HARMAN EMEKTİR (THRESHING IS WORK) , OT GÜZELLİKTİR (WEED IS BEAUTY), OT İSTENMEYENDİR (WEED IS UNWANTED). The attributes classified as follows: AĞAÇ (TREE) is highly neutral, BAĞ (VINEYARD) is neutral or positive, GÜL (ROSE) is positive, HARMAN (THRESHING) is neutral or positive, and OT (WEED) is mostly positive.