The conceptual nature of the Turkish emotion term ‘Heyecan’

This study aims at investigating the Turkish emotion concept heyecan (i.e., thrill, excitement, and nervousness), which can be used with different semantic contents depending on the context. The conceptual metaphor theory frames this analysis to reveal the metaphorical and metonymical conceptualizations of heyecan. For this purpose, the lemma heyecan is searched in the Turkish National Corpus, and 700 concordance lines gathered from the corpus are examined through the metaphor identification procedure to identify the source domains and interpret the conceptual coding. The findings reveal a folk model of heyecan in which several metaphors and metonymies characterize different dimensions of it: arousal–existence–disappearance, intensity–passivity, control, cause–effect, and individual–social. Qualitative and quantitative findings embody various linguistic metaphors that can be grouped under several source domain categories including substance in a container, location, and object as the most frequent ones, whereas physiological effect is the most frequent metonymy. The metaphors and metonymies are discussed with their examples in this study. The concordance lines show several emotion terms that heyecan is collocated with, among which the emotion families of ‘fear’ and ‘happiness’ outnumber the rest. This study demonstrates how corpus data are helpful in pinpointing the conceptual content of an emotion term in a coherent way.