LINGUOCULTURAL REPRESENTATION OF HUMAN SENSORY PERCEPTION AND PHYSIOLOGICAL RESPONSES IN BABURNAMA

Abstract

This article examines the linguocultural representation of human sensory perception and physiological responses in Zahiriddin Muhammad Babur’s Baburnama. As one of the most significant autobiographical and historical works of classical Turkic prose, Baburnama contains extensive information concerning geographical space, natural environment, social relations, military campaigns, everyday life, physical conditions, illness, medical practices, and the author’s personal observations. Within this broad textual framework, descriptions of human sensory perception and bodily reactions constitute an important layer through which individual experience is transformed into linguistic and cultural meaning.

  The principal purpose of the study is to investigate the ways in which visual, auditory, tactile, thermal, and pain-related experiences are represented linguistically and how these representations interact with the historical and cultural context of the work. Particular attention is given to descriptions of cold, heat, physical exertion, fatigue, injury, pain, bodily parts, environmental influence, and medical treatment. The study also examines the relationship between external stimuli, bodily sensations, physiological responses, emotional reactions, and their verbal expression.

The research is based primarily on textual, contextual, semantic, descriptive, comparative, and linguocultural methods. The analysis takes Baburnama as the primary literary-historical source and uses relevant linguistic and translation studies as secondary sources. Previous scholarship has already examined particular lexical fields of Baburnama, including medical terminology, phraseological units, measurement vocabulary, and translation problems. Z. Q. Teshaboyeva, for example, has specifically investigated medical terminology occurring in Baburnama and its English translations, while her 2023 multilingual dictionary provides a systematic resource for the study of phraseological units and their Uzbek, Russian, and English representations.[1][2] The present research develops a related but more narrowly integrated perspective by bringing sensory perception, physiological response, linguistic representation, and cultural interpretation into a single analytical framework.

The findings indicate that sensory and physiological descriptions in Baburnama perform several functions simultaneously. They document concrete bodily experience, strengthen the autobiographical character of the narrative, establish the narrator’s direct relationship with the environment, contribute to characterization, preserve elements of historical medical culture, and transmit culturally significant information through lexical and phraseological forms. The human body consequently appears in the text not merely as a biological object but as a point of interaction between individual experience, geographical environment, social relations, historical circumstances, and cultural knowledge.

The article does not claim that sensory perception as a general phenomenon has never been addressed in Babur studies. Instead, it proposes a specific analytical perspective based on the systematic relationship among external stimulus, sensory perception, bodily sensation, physiological response, linguistic representation, and cultural interpretation. This approach may contribute to further research in historical linguistics, linguoculturology, literary stylistics, translation studies, and the study of classical Uzbek prose.