Conceptual domain relations in old Turkic inscriptions according to metaphor and metonymy theory

Although the old Turkic inscriptions, which are the oldest texts of Turkic language, have some interpretations problems, a limited number of subject fields and vocabulary, they point to a wider vocabulary and a wide variety of conceptual domain relationships in terms of the elements they contain. The semantic structuring of the vocabulary develops depending on a number of concepts and conceptual domain relations. Therefore, determining the mental processes according to which the domain relations occur also means revealing the ways of figurative thought and lexical meaning. Based on this idea, in this study, the vocabulary in old Turkic inscriptions are investigated within the framework of domain, metaphor and metonymy, which are the main subjects of cognitive linguistics. Accordingly, there are two basic types of relationships between the domains that the menaings of words indicate. The first of these is metonymy, which, in its most general form, is accepted as an acccess to another concept by referring to a concept or entity within the same domain. The other is metaphor relationship known as mapping from one domain to another between different domain. With this approach, first of all, the words in the old Turkic inscriptions were grouped in terms of word families by morphological analysis. Then, the metaphor and metonymy relationships between the concepts/entities that word families and other words that are not included in any word family refer to were determined and classified. Thus, the ways of semantic structuring in the vocabulary of old Turkic and the figurative thought structure in the text were revealed.