A Polysemous Study of Temporal Prepositions Based on Cognitive Semantics in Ilami Kurdish Language

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Associate professor in Linguistics, English Language Department, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran

2 M.A in Linguistics ,Humanity sciences faculty, Ilam university, Ilam, Iran

3 Assistant Professor in Linguistics,, Humanity Sciences faculty, Ilam University, Ilam, Iran

Abstract

Polysemy is a phenomenon in which a lexical item is usually associated with two or more meanings that seem to be related in some way. The current research aims to conduct semantic research on a limited body of language in order to obtain a generalizable result. Relying on the descriptive-analytical method and using the cognitive lexical semantics approach of Tyler and Evans (2003), the authors have extracted and analyzed the different meanings of 7 prepositions of time (wӕrӡӕ,Ɂӕre, nǝzik, dӕ, dǝma, dǝj, ta) in Ilami Kurdish language which were extracted from the daily speech of the people and Ilami Kurdish dictionary. Finally, it was found that the cognitive semantics approach is a very suitable method to investigate the prepositions of time in the Ilami Kurdish language, and the results showed that in these prepositions, several concepts are organized in relation to a central concept and we showed that all these concepts are systematically derived from the first concept according to the criteria of Tyler and Evans. In such a way that proposition(wӕrӡӕ) just has one central meaning, but propositions (Ɂӕre, nǝzik, dӕ) beside the central meaning have another meaning and propositions (dǝma, dǝj, ta) beside the central meaning have two other related meanings.

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