Conceptualization of Emotions Through Color Terms: A Comparative Study of Spanish and Uzbek

The cognitive conceptualization of emotions through color terms represents a significant domain of inquiry within cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics. This comparative study examines the metaphorical and metonymic associations between color vocabulary and emotional states in Spanish and Uzbek. Utilizing a corpus-informed, contrastive analysis framework, the research investigates how cultural models, environmental factors, and historical linguistic developments shape the linguistic categorization of emotions. The primary focus is directed toward the conceptualization of negative emotions such as envy, anger, and sadness. Findings indicate that while Spanish frequently employs green (verde) to denote envy and yellow (amarillo) to denote bile-related anger—deeply rooted in the ancient Greco-Roman humoral theory—Uzbek primarily relies on black (qora) and yellow (sariq) to conceptualize envy (hasad), malice (ichi qoralik), and sorrow (g‘am-gussa), driven by Turkic cultural paradigms and somatological perceptions. The study demonstrates that while basic physiological symptoms provide a universal somatic baseline for color-emotion metaphors, cultural cognitive models dictate the specific lexical choices and semantic extensions in each language.