Aspects of Polysemy in Turkic and Mongolic Languages(Evidence from Kalmyk and Uighur Languages)

Abstract

With evidence from Kalmyk and Uighur languages, the article discusses some features of polysemous lexical forms in the light of modern psycholinguistic approaches and aspects of cognitive linguistics. According to the theory of multilevel values of polysemy, a word is represented as a set of interrelated variants united by one underlying dominant. Depending on the context, the dominant value may be the main and potential ones. The analysis of the linguistic materials confirms the view that lexical and grammatical variations of words and verbal meanings do not exist outside the context and experience of verbal communication. The word and its meaning is considered as a single category, which includes results of analysis of the process of our cognition, while maintaining the units of language tokens and the possibility of different types of expressions in speech. Proceeding from similarities of forms, functions, results, mental associations, etc., the approach allows to determine typological peculiarities of development of polysemy in the examined languages. The paper analyzes a number of Kalmyk and Uighur linguistic materials and considers the mechanism of interrelation between the meaning and word sense, given that a word is a manifested unity of language and speech, and the polysemy of the word can be described as a set of interrelated variants of forms united by a base dominant. Those can be referred to as a paradygm or embodied standard contexts of the lexeme, and are academically defined as lexical-semantic variants.