THE CONTEXT OF THE SITUATION AS A REASON FOR POLYSEMY IN TURKISH[1]

Abstract

The context of the situation is a concept about how verbal and written dialogues, within a situation, work in the human mind. This concept has three factors, which are the field, the tenor, and the mode. These three factors form the main elements of the context of the situation. This elements are developed by M.A.K. Halliday. This article attempts to show how the words in dialogues gain new meanings and become polysemic through these factors. This paper follows a case-study design, with an in-depth analysis of Michael Halliday’s the context of the situation theory. Data for this study is collected using a screenplay named Korkuyorum Anne İnsan Nedir ki (I am Afraid, Mother What is a Human) written by Reha Erdem and Nilüfer Güngörmüş in 2009. Nouns, adjectives, and verbs are selected from the text by their frequency of occurrence. For this purpose, polysemic words in the text, are scanned and separated into word classes. Then, Halliday’s theory, which argues that a word gains its meaning depending on the context, is examined. By this way, we would like to prove why nouns, adjectives, and verbs gain their new meanings, also why they follow different methods because of their various semantic structure.