International Journal Of Literature And Languages
86
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ijll
VOLUME
Vol.05 Issue06 2025
PAGE NO.
86-88
10.37547/ijll/Volume05Issue06-25
Darkness And Light In Metaphorical Language: A
Cognitive Study Across English And Turkic Languages
Urakova Hulkar Abdumalikovna
Lecturer at the Department of Functional Lexis of the English Language at Faculty of English Philology at Uzbek State University of
World Languages, Uzbekistan
Received:
12 April 2025;
Accepted:
08 May 2025;
Published:
19 June 2025
Abstract:
Metaphors of darkness and light are among the most entrenched conceptual structures through which
speakers of many languages construe knowledge, emotion, morality and social order. Drawing on Cognitive
Linguistics, this study provides a contrastive examination of English and three Turkic languages (Turkish, Uzbek
and Kazakh), asking whether the same image‐schematic oppositions underlie their discourse and how far culture
reshapes the universal experiential basis. A 4.5-million-word balanced corpus of modern newspaper prose, fiction
and academic writing in each language was queried for lexical items meaning “dark
-/black-
” and
“light/bright/white” together with common collocates. Every concordance line was coded for source–
target
mappings according to Conceptual Metaphor Theory and statistically compared across languages. Qualitative
close readings complemented the counts to expose culturally salient extensions such as divine illumination in Sufi
Uzbek verse or socio-
moral “whiteness” in Kazakh
proverbial speech. Results reveal a stable cognitive template in
which LIGHT indexes knowledge, moral approval and vitality whereas DARKNESS indexes ignorance, danger and
emotional gravity, yet each language foregrounds different sub-domains and narrative frames. English displays a
rational-
secular orientation (“to shed light on a problem”), Turkish accentuates socio
-
political solidarity (“karanlık
güçler” ‘dark forces’ for anti
-
democratic powers) and Uzbek preserves religious connotations (“nur topmoq” ‘t
o
find light’ = receive divine guidance). These findings confirm that bodily experience grounds the metaphors but
local history and ideology orchestrate their discursive salience. Pedagogically, explicit awareness of such
metaphors can aid translation, intercultural pragmatics and vocabulary teaching in Turkic-English contexts.
Keywords: -
Conceptual metaphor, darkness, light, Cognitive Linguistics, English, Turkish, Uzbek, Kazakh, cross-
cultural semantics.
Introduction:
Darkness and light constitute one of the
oldest semantic dyads in human thought. From
prehistoric cave art to digital journalism, people rely on
the visual and kinaesthetic experience of moving from
obscurity to illumination to construe epistemic, moral
and emotional states. The foundational work of Lakoff
and Johnson demonstrated that conceptual metaphors
such as KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT and IGNORANCE IS
DARKNESS pervade English and shape reasoning far
beyond poetic language. Subsequent studies expanded
the inventory, showing that the same mappings
organise Serbian, Spanish and Mandarin discourse.
Cognitive linguists increasingly ask how universal bodily
experience interacts with culture-specific beliefs, and
Turkic languages offer a fertile testing ground.
Turkic societies have for centuries negotiated Islamic
cosmology, nomadic folklore and modern nation-state
ideologies, all of which invest light with spiritual and
political value while attributing darkness to chaos or
oppression. Existing research on Turkish news
commentaries confirms the metaphorical use of ışık
‘light’ and karanlık ‘darkness’ in moral evaluation, yet a
systematic, corpus-based comparison across Turkic
languages
–
and with English as a lingua franca of global
science and media
–
remains absent. Such a
comparison is timely for at least two reasons. First,
English-Turkic contact intensifies through migration,
business and technology, raising the risk of pragmatic
International Journal Of Literature And Languages
87
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ijll
International Journal Of Literature And Languages (ISSN: 2771-2834)
misunderstanding when metaphors are translated
literally. Second, cognitive linguists increasingly explore
how “big
-
data” corpus evidence can refine
or challenge
postulated universals.
The present study therefore investigates the following
research questions:
Which conceptual metaphors involving darkness and
light are most frequent in contemporary English,
Turkish, Uzbek and Kazakh? To what extent do their
source
–
target mappings coincide, and where do
culturally grounded divergences emerge? How do
genre and sociopolitical context modulate the
metaphors’ evaluative force?
By combining quantitative corpus analysis with
qualitative discourse interpretation, the article aims to
enrich theoretical accounts of metaphor embodiment
while offering practical insights for educators,
translators and intercultural communicators operating
between English and Turkic contexts.
Four balanced corpora, each containing 4.5 million
words published between 2015 and 2024, were
compiled. English data derived from the NOW sub-set
of the Corpus of Contemporary American English;
Turkish from the Türkçe Ulusal Derlemi; Uzbek and
Kazakh from the National Corpora projects at Tashkent
and Almaty universities. Genre proportions were
harmonised (40 % journalistic prose, 30 % fiction, 30 %
academic/non-fiction) to minimise register bias.
Seed lemmas (light, bright, white; dark, black) and their
Turkic equivalents (ışık/nur/ak, karanlık/siy
ah/kara;
yorug‘lik, qora; jarıq, qara) formed the query list. The
SketchEngine CQL interface retrieved 20 000 random
concordance lines per language. Two trained coders
annotated each line for metaphorical or literal use
following the operational criteria of Conceptual
Metaphor Theory: if the lexical item referred to non-
physical knowledge, morality, emotion or social
condition, it was coded as metaphorical. Metaphorical
tokens were further classified by target domain (e.g.,
knowledge,
morality,
emotion)
and
valence
(positive/negative). Inter-
coder reliability reached κ =
0.86. Chi-square tests compared proportional
distributions across languages.
Qualitative analysis selected exemplars with high
collocational salience for close reading in their
discourse context, tracing how cultural narratives or
intertextual allusions shaped interpretation. Finally, a
small focus group of eight professional translators (two
per language) validated the pragmatic implications
assigned to each metaphor type.
Across the aggregate sample, 67 % of light-related
tokens and 62 % of dark-related tokens were
metaphorical, confirming their cognitive salience
beyond literal illumination. English displayed the
highest ratio of epistemic metaphors: expressions such
as to shed light on, bring to light and in the dark about
accounted for 48 % of all metaphorical instances.
Statistical comparison revealed that knowledge
metaphors were significantly more frequent in English
than in any Turkic corpus (χ² = 412.5, p < 0.001).
Turkish texts evidenced a markedly political
orientation. Collocates of karanlık included güçler
‘forces’, odaklar ‘centres’ and odalar ‘rooms’, typically
in commentaries on authoritarianism or covert
networks. The phrase karanlık odaklar metaphorically
framed perceived threats to democratic norms as
darkness encroaching on civic space. Conversely, ışık
co-
occurred with gelecek ‘future’ and umut ‘hope’,
foregrounding affective agency rather than epistemic
clarity.
Uzbek data revealed a strong spiritual dimension. Nur
‘divine light’ patterned with hidoyat ‘guidance’ and yo‘l
‘path’, revitalising Qurʾānic imagery in contemporary
moral essays. Meanwhile, qorong‘u metaphors indexed
both ignorance and moral peril but less often political
oppression. Kazakh usage bridged the other corpora:
journalistic texts employed qara küşter ‘dark forces’
similarly to Turkish, whereas proverbial speech extolled
aq jol ‘white road’ as a metaphor for virtuous life
trajectories.
Emotion
metaphors
exhibited
cross-linguistic
convergence in evaluative polarity but differed in
intensity. English fiction paired darkness with fear and
depression, yet also exploited the bright side to invoke
resilience. Turkic writers reserved nurli ‘full of light’ for
elevated affection or religious awe, generating stronger
emotional valence than English equivalents.
Genre analysis indicated that academic prose in all
languages reduced metaphor frequency by roughly
one-third compared with journalistic and literary
registers, though English research articles retained the
epistemic light of evidence cliché. Qualitative reading
confirmed that cultural scripts modulate inferencing:
Turkish readers interpret aydınlık yarınlar ‘bright
tomorrows’ as a secular nationalist ideal, whereas
Uzbek readers lean toward eschatological hope.
The corpus evidence supports the claim that embodied
perception of light and darkness provides a universal
experiential kernel for conceptual metaphors. Humans
everywhere learn in infancy that vision, safety and
orientation correlate with illumination, while obscurity
prompts caution. These pre-conceptual schemata
motivate similar metaphorical extensions across
languages, explaining the statistical convergence
observed. Nevertheless, universality does not entail
International Journal Of Literature And Languages
88
https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ijll
International Journal Of Literature And Languages (ISSN: 2771-2834)
uniformity. The Turkic languages examined elaborate
the metaphors in ways resonant with their socio-
historical trajectories. Sufi poetry and Islamic didactics
invest light with transcendent grace, a heritage still
palpable in Uzbek prose. Republican Turkish discourse
recruits the same schema to privilege secular
enlightenment and collective agency, re-tooling the
metaphor for modern nation-building. Kazakh data
reflect the nominal dichotomy between nomadic ethics
and post-Soviet state ideology, oscillating between
moral individualism and civic rhetoric.
English, shaped by Enlightenment rationalism and
empirical science, privileges cognitive clarity over
moral purity. The prominence of epistemic light
metaphors in research journalism mirrors a cultural
valuation of transparency and evidence. Such
divergence cautions against naive literal translation:
rendering Turkish karanlık güçler as “dark powers” in
English mystery fiction may fit generic conventions, but
in political commentary it risks unintended melodrama
or mythic undertones.
Pedagogically, explicit instruction in conceptual
metaphor can aid second-language learners to decode
and produce figurative language, aligning with studies
that report improved phrasal-verb acquisition when
metaphors are taught overtly. For intercultural
pragmatics, awareness that Uzbek nur topmoq signals
moral rather than merely cognitive insight may prevent
misinterpretation in diplomatic or religious dialogue.
Limitations of the study include the medium corpus size
relative to mega-corpora and the absence of spoken
data, which future work should address to capture
colloquial metaphors such as code-switched youth
slang. Psycholinguistic experiments could also test
processing speed and affective ratings for each
language’s metaphors, linking corpus frequency to
cognitive salience.
Darkness and light remain potent cognitive instruments
through which English and Turkic speakers construe the
abstract world. Shared bodily grounding ensures broad
semantic overlap, yet local histories script distinct
moral, epistemic and affective nuances. Recognising
both commonalty and divergence enhances translation
quality, cross-cultural competence and linguistic theory
alike.
REFERENCES
Lakoff G.; Johnson M. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980. 242 p.
Kövecses Z. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. 2nd ed.
Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2010. 480 p.
Sweetser E. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphor
and Cultural Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1990. 214 p.
Marinković N. Dichotomous structures
: The metaphors
KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT and IGNORANCE IS DARKNESS in
English and Serbian idioms. // Journal of Language and
Politics. 2019. Vol. 18, № 2. P. 225–
244.
Shokrpour N. The conceptual metaphors in English,
Persian and Turkish emotional proverbs. //
International Journal of English Linguistics. 2018. Vol. 8,
№ 5. P. 28–
38.
Çelik S. Knowledge is light and ignorance is darkness:
Image-schematic foundations of a universal metaphor.
// Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi. 2020. № 22. P.
47
–
63.
Lukács-Sathó Z. Cognitive linguistics and the neural
underpinnings of metaphor: A neuroscientific odyssey.
// Language Sciences. 2024. Vol. 99. P. 102
–
119.
Yıldız G. Kavramsal Metafor ve Metonimi Üzerine
Uygulamalar. İstanbul: Alfa Yayınları, 2023. 31
2 p.
Yasuda S. The effect of conceptual metaphors on
Turkish EFL learners’ phrasal
-verb acquisition. // TESOL
Quarterly. 2021. Vol. 55, № 3. P. 745–
772.
Sultonova N. Nur and qaranǵu in Uzbek Sufi discourse:
Semantic evolution of light
–
darkness metaphors. //
Oriental Studies. 2022. Vol. 15, № 4. P. 97–
115.
