Toward a Cognitive Taxonomy for Explicitating Shifts in Translation

The aim of this research is to study the borrowing of Persian conjunctions by speakers of Azerbayjani Turkish and its effect on their language. Data were collected from Azerbayjani Turkish resources and its speakers in Ardabil province. Data analysis based on linguistic and non-linguistic criteria of borrowing/code-switching differentiation shows that the majority of Persian conjunctions have been borrowed by Azerbayjani Turkish and some of them appear as code-switched elements in bilinguals’ speech. The findings correspond to Myers-Scotton’s view confirming borrowing/code-switching continuum as a mechanism for accomplishment of borrowing process. Speakers of Azerbayjani Turkish borrow Persian conjunctions to combine their language clauses. They do not substitute Persian compound sentence structures with those from their native language ones and they use the structures of both due to pragmatic reasons. The results match the second level of Thomason & Kaufman’s (1988) borrowing hierarchy supposing slight and limited changes to conjunction borrowing.