From the past to the present, human societies have coexisted together with animal populations. In this cooccurrence, people generally consider animals as a source of food or benefit from the labor power of animals. We can say that this relationship between humans and animals is moving towards a more positive direction in terms of animals with the development and transformation of human societies. The relationship in question will likely have different effects on both sides and these effects will have different outputs. The reflections, in other words, the conceptualizations of the relationship between humans, who can speak, and animals, can be followed through linguistic data. The dominant view of the cognitive semantics approach, namely the point of view that mental structures are the meanings of linguistic expressions, is explained by the metaphor mechanism. In cognitive semantics, unlike traditional approaches, metaphor is not a stylistic feature; considered the mapping between conceptual domains in the human mind. Thus, semantic structures emerge thanks to the mappings between conceptual domains. This study aims to reveal the reflections of the relationship between humans and animals in the minds of Turks through Turkish animal expressions. In the data identification process, a target list of animal names was first determined. This target list was created from the Turkish Dictionary (2011), which reflects the vocabulary of standard Turkish in the best way.Then, the animal names in this target list were checked through the written texts in the Turkish National Corpus. In the data analysis process, each linguistic unit was evaluated in the context of use. The values of animal names in their context of use are marked as positive, neutral and negative. In the research, it has been determined that Turkish animal names actively reflect the conceptual metaphors of HUMAN IS ANIMAL, HUMAN BEHAVIOR IS ANIMAL BEHAVIOR, from the ANIMAL source domain to the HUMAN target domain, at the linguistic level. In addition, it is among the findings that such linguistic expressions are mostly used with negative value markings in Turkish society and culture.
Metaphor, animal names, conseptualization, Turkish