Orientational Metaphors in Italian, Spanish and Serbian Phraseologisms with the Component eye

Spatial relations, more precisely the formation of concepts related to spatial orientation and the study of phraseologisms in which they are based, represent a relevant, but insufficiently examined part of cognitive research. The paper deals with orientational conceptual metaphors in the phraseologisms of two Romance languages (Italian and Spanish) and one Slavic language (Serbian) that have a somatic component eye their lexical composition. According to the cognitive-semantic approach, conceptual metaphor is one of the basic organizational principles of the human conceptual system. On the other hand, the lexeme eye represents one of the phraseologically most productive somatisms. The aim of the research is to identify the most common orientational metaphors in phraseologisms with a component eye in three typologically (un)related languages, to establish how consistently they follow the postulates of cognitive metaphor theory and to determine whether the analyzed orientational metaphors are universal or culturally determined, having in mind that orientational metaphors in somatic phraseologisms are not motivated exclusively by bodily experience, but have, like all other conceptual metaphors, a sociocultural basis. The analysis of the excerpted corpus shows that the following metaphors induce the creation of phraseologisms: good is up, bad is down; good is near, bad is far; good is right, bad is left; good is front, bad is back and good is shallow, bad is deep. In the largest number of examples of phraseologisms with a component eye the polarization good - bad, it is in accordance with the postulates of cognitive metaphor theory where up, near, right, front and shallow are understood as positive, and down, far, left, back and deep as negative, which can explain the existence of identical or similar phraseologisms in genetically (un)related languages. The analysis also reveals that orientational metaphors often appear with another conceptual metaphor (or metonymy). Finally, in the majority of cases, phraseologisms in which one of the orientation metaphors is activated have no objective connection with real space. They are formed on the basis of human conventional knowledge and as a consequence of man's conceptualization of reality