Яшил иқтисодиёт ва тараққиёт Volume 4 Issue 6 (2026) · pp. 364-369
A CONTRASTIVE COGNITIVE-SEMANTIC ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL METAPHORS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK ACADEMIC AND LITERARY DISCOURSE
Sheraliev, Axror
Abstract
This study provides a contrastive cognitive-semantic investigation of spatial metaphors in English and Uzbek, examining their linguistic realizations and cultural conceptualizations. Grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) proposed by Lakoff and Johnson, the study explores how primary spatial orientations—specifically UP-DOWN (verticality), FRONT-BACK (horizontality), and IN-OUT(containment)—are mapped onto abstract domains such as time, emotion, social status, and control. A corpus of 400 spatial expressions (200 in English and 200 in Uzbek) was systematically extracted from lexicographical sources, including the British National Corpus (BNC), the Uzbek National Corpus, and bilingual dictionaries. The research employs qualitative comparative analysis and quantitative semantic mapping. The results demonstrate that both languages share a foundational cognitive baseline whereverticality represents positive states (e.g., 'HAPPY IS UP') and control (e.g., 'CONTROL IS UP'), indicating universal experiential grounding in human embodiment. However, significant variations emerge in the lexicalization and morphosyntactic structures of these mappings. Uzbek exhibits a strong preference for somatic containment schemas, frequently employing body-part terms such as bosh (head), yuz (face), qo‗l (hand), and ort (back) with possessive and case suffixes to structure spatial-metaphorical relationships. Conversely, English relies on abstract prepositional and adverbial particles. These differences reflect the typological divergence between synthetic-agglutinative (Uzbek) and analytical (English) language structures, as well as distinct socio-cultural conceptualizations of space and time. This study offers fresh insights for cognitive linguistics, translation practice, and bilingual lexicography.
comparative linguisticsspatial metaphorconceptual metaphor theoryEnglish and Uzbek;cognitive semantics; somatic schemas.
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