A cognitive study of polysemy in loanwords of Farsi and Turkish of Azarbayejan

Polysemy is one of the most important issues that has been considered in different schools of linguistics and especially in cognitive approach. In this descriptive-documentary study, polysemy in loanwords of Persian and Turkish of Azerbaijani was discussed. The data selected from local journals in Persian and Turkish languages, the Turkish-Persian dictionary of Shahmaresi and the Persian-Azerbaijani dictionary written by Behzadi. Prototypical meanings were based on the results of the interview and the linguistic intuition of the authors. Totally, 20 polysemous common adjectives identified from the corpuses and a radial network drawn from six of them. Among the cognitive mechanisms of polysemy creation, it was proved that conceptual metaphors would play the greatest role among them. Moreover, the connection between the meanings of polysemous adjectives is not accidental, but a systematic relationship existed and described by radial categorization. It was also found that the cognitive mechanisms of polysemy creation in Turkish and Persian common adjectives (loanwords) were the same and they differed only in the number of peripheral meanings which can be a step in confirming the sharing of human cognitive abilities. Also, high number of peripheral meanings in the target language may be due to the bilingualism and dynamic schematics. The results, along with complementary studies, can be applied in the field of language teaching, lexicography, more efficient translation machines and they will be helpful for all the stakeholders in the field.