Category of space in Shor heroic epos: aspects of language and culture

Space and time make the basis of human mind and are relevant for any kind of discourse.Categories of space and time are traditionally compared in linguistics, especially when comparinglanguages of different origin and/or typology. Space and time are also usually focused on in folklorestudies.In Shor heroic epos space and time are specified by means of epic formulas, the so-called''common places'' - syntagmatic chains containing information about a specific situation in the courseof narration; these are: introduction (world creation), the miraculous birth of the protagonist, namegiving, description of hero's equipment, the search of the foretold bride, etc.The conceptual field ''Real space'' includes such segments as 'world as a whole', 'luminaries andnatural elements' and 'landscape elements'.The world as a whole in epos is characterized through the oppositions 'mountain - sea/river','land - water' and conceptual features ''having many layers'', ''motherland'', ''sacredness'',''having center and periphery''. The denotations of the sun, the moon, air and water elements,originating from the old-Turkic epoch also play an important part of the spatial world outlook in epos.In Shor heroic epos landscape objects are considerably numerous, the diversity of which can bedivided into two groups: 1) names of elevations and their parts; 2) names of lowlands. Climate andgeographic conditions of Central Asia and the Sayan-Altai mountain system, where old-Turkic andgenetically related Shor heroic epos appeared, are revealed in the description of the epic world.The horizontal space is organized by the sequence of mountains, rocks, steppes and deserts. Thekey topographic element of the landscape is the patrimonial mountain, marking the territory border inShor epos. Smaller mountains in combination with steppes form the landscape of the epic world andthe idea of the motherland.The Upper world is not clearly specified. Since it is the man who is placed in the centre of theepic narrative, the world of gods and spirits is placed on the background. Spirits and gods can help orhinder the protagonist, but the place of their dwelling unlike the Middle world is not characterized,though in mythopoetic world model the Upper and the Lower worlds are the copies of the Middleone - they also have mountains, steppes and water bodies.We made word selection and compared it to the proto-Turkic lexicon, reconstructed in the numberof about 1000 units from the semantic fields relevant for the ideas of dwelling place and life mode ofproto-Turks. The high level of similarities between the Shor epic and the Old-Turkic languages provesthat geographic features of ancient Turks' dwelling territories are reflected in Shor heroic epos.

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