The Epistemic and Interpretative Role of Metaphor in Uzbek Scientific Discourse

This article examines the epistemic and interpretative role of metaphor in Uzbek scientific discourse from a cognitive-discursive perspective. The study investigates how metaphorical units contribute to the formation, conceptualization, structuring, and interpretation of scientific knowledge in Uzbek-language academic texts. The theoretical framework is grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The research is based on a corpus of Uzbek scientific articles, dissertations, and monographs, within which metaphorical expressions were identified, classified, and systematized into conceptual models. The corpus comprises texts from linguistics, pedagogy, and social sciences, allowing cross-disciplinary comparison of metaphorical patterns. The analysis demonstrates that structural, ontological, and orientational metaphors function as cognitive instruments that facilitate nomination, terminological stabilization, theoretical modeling, and explanatory coherence. Scientific processes are frequently conceptualized through metaphors of construction, mechanisms, systems, motion, and spatial relations, enabling abstract knowledge to be interpreted through embodied experiential domains. The findings confirm that metaphor in Uzbek scientific discourse operates not as a decorative stylistic device, but as a fundamental epistemic and interpretative mechanism structuring scientific reasoning and shaping knowledge representation.