In recent decades, theoretical linguistics has produced a number of successful studies, and the investigation of modern linguistics together with its newly emerging fields has become a focal point of scholarly attention. Within this context, cognitive linguistics – derived from cognitive science – treats language as the primary material through which the mind is studied. The present article examines the conceptualization of the human inner world through the concepts of happiness, love, and friendship, with special attention to their linguistic realization in Uzbek and English discourse. The notion of concept is discussed as a multi-layered cognitive formation whose scope exceeds that of a dictionary “notion,” since it encodes culturally shared knowledge and evaluative experience. Love is approached as an empirical emotion and an evaluative attitude, and its interpretations are described through everyday, general-philosophical, and artistic manifestations. The analysis draws on Uzbek literary material (including examples associated with Abdulla Qahhor’s Muhabbat) and paremiological data, while also engaging English-language evidence. Happiness is further explored through etymological and lexical-semantic observations, including synonymic clusters and culturally salient associations. Friendship is discussed as an affective and ethical construct interconnected with love and “heart/soul” lexemes, revealing conceptual overlap and pragmatic nuance. Overall, the study argues that inner-world concepts are shaped by cultural models, lexical-semantic fields, and discourse patterns, and that cross-linguistic comparison helps reveal both universal and culture-specific conceptual features.

Cognitive linguistics, concept, inner world

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