The language of pain in Turkish: A cognitive linguistic approach

Pain, which is as old as human history, continues to be one of the situations in which solutions are sought in today's health sector, despite many methods such as nerve stimulators, pain pacemakers, nerve blocks beyond ordinary painkillers. Pain; disrupts the balance of the body, threatens the health of the person, but one of the reasons why pain compels is the difficulty in its linguistic transmission. Metaphors that are used to make pain more understandable and convey it are the subject of this study. In order to determine the metaphors of pain in everyday language, interviews were conducted with the patients and examples were compiled from the virtual environment. In addition, examples from literary texts were taken to determine metaphors in fictional texts. In this thesis study, the data collected from three different areas were analyzed by descriptive analysis method. The metaphors used by Turkish speakers in Turkey to express their pain were determined, then primary and complex metaphors were determined by comparing the pain metaphors used in Turkish language spoken in Turkey to the pain metaphors in different languages (English, Italian, Greek, Hindi, Thai, Arabic, Persian). As a result of the investigations; it has been seen that people inevitably benefit from metaphors as expressing their pain, while the metaphors in everyday language in which pain is described are more limited, the metaphors used in literary texts are more diverse. It has been concluded that pain is primarily metaphorized as an ENEMY, and other metaphors are mostly gathered in the groups of "natural physical things" and "complex objects" according to the Big Chain Metaphor.