A Cognitive Form of Spatialization: Mind (Mental) Metaphors And Related Lexical Choices In Old Uyghur

Conceptual metaphors, which have an important function in language-mind relations, are shown among the thinking practices that emerge with various conceptual connections such as concretization and simile. These metaphors, which bear the traces of primitive thinking activities in daily life, are generally defined as making use of concrete concepts in order to understand abstract concepts. With the "conceptual metaphor theory" first put forward by Lakoff and Johnson (1980), such forms of expression in the world's languages have become the focus of attention. According to this theory, which questions what kind of mental relationships are used to express abstract concepts such as time, life and thought, many concepts are understood based on conceptual metaphors. On the other hand, studies conducted to date show that a large portion of the conceptual metaphor types that can be diversified have universal characteristics. One of these metaphors is the CONTAINER METAPHORS, which are about an abstract concept such as “the mind”. CONTAINER METAPHORS, which represent a communication system in which the mind is a container and thoughts are placed in this container, result in the mind being perceived as an object in terms of concretization. However, the first stage in the preliminary thinking practices for abstract concepts requires the mind to be associated with space. Because, ontologically, the existence of a being or object in the world depends on the condition of being in space. Therefore, the inter-conceptual relationships that conceptual metaphors have are not only represented by concrete-abstract relationships; they are also represented by a progressive chain of concepts. In this study, based on the argument that the concept of mind is associated with space before the objectification process, historical texts will be scanned and classified within the scope of Old Uyghur texts. Firstly, the conceptual field of the word marking the concept of mind will be evaluated with various linguistic data. Then, it will be examined whether the abstraction of the mind has conceptual relations such as space, then object/being and finally advanced metaphor. In this respect, the universality of the available typological data will be discussed by evaluating the views put forward in previous studies.