‘Head’ Idioms in Turkish: Contrasts and Correlations

Abstract

This paper presents a semantic and syntactic investigation of idioms containing the terms for 'head' in Turkish. In a study based on 350 idioms and their occurrences in a corpus (TS corpus), we found that (i) there is a pattern in the senses of the idioms created with different terms for ‘head’ (i.e. metaphor themes link idioms, cf. (Lakoff & Johnson 2003)) (ii) this pattern is reflected, to some extent, in the syntactic difference between the idioms that these terms create, (iii) while all the terms can be used metaphorically, only baş idioms create metonymy (iv) metonymy can always bear possession.