Cognitive Aspects of the Phraseology of Precipitation in the Kazakh and Kyrgyz Languages
Abstract
The phraseology of precipitation as a weather phenomenon occupies an important part in the Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages. Each phraseological fund encompasses rich imagery and specific cognitive characteristics. The objectives of this research were to discover the cognitive characteristics of rain, snow and hail based on their participation in phraseology. A qualitative research design grounded in the apparatus and methodology of cognitive linguistics was employed for cognitive and linguo-cultural analysis of a set of 50 phrasemes collected from lexicographic and corpus-based sources. The study also used theoretical principles of the Conventional Figurative Language Theory to explain the meaning and motivation of the phrasemes in question which were further classified according to the meaning of target domains. It was found that the Kazakh and Kyrgyz languages share many weather vocabulary and phraseological units which appeared during common historical development. The major finding is that the mappings of precipitation concepts of ‘rain’, ‘snow’ and ‘hail’ are characterization of a precipitation type, personal qualities, or intensity of an action. Though the research scope is limited to the two languages of the Kipchak subgroup, it will contribute to further examine the preservation of shared Turkic phraseology which reflects unique views on the nature shared by one of the largest language families.