CONCEPTUAL BLENDING AND METAPHOR IN UZBEK LANGUAGE: A COGNITIVE ANALYSIS

This article examines the relationship between conceptual blending and metaphor in the Uzbek language from a cognitive linguistic perspective. Drawing on Fauconnier and Turner's blending framework and Lakoff and Johnson's conceptual metaphor theory, the study analyzes a range of Uzbek metaphorical expressions and argues that many of them involve not merely domain-to-domain mappings but complex blending operations in which emergent structure is produced in the blended space. The article demonstrates that blending theory offers a more complete account of Uzbek metaphor than classical CMT alone.