THE SEMANTIC ROLES OF SOMATISMS IN THE ENGLISH AND UZBEK PROVERBS

Аннотация

This thesis explores semantic roles of somatisms in the English and Uzbek proverbs. Proverbs constitute one of the oldest and most condensed layers of folk wisdom, encapsulating the moral, ethical and pragmatic experiences of generations. Among the lexical means employed in proverbial expressions, somatisms – lexical units denoting parts of the human body – occupy a particularly prominent place. This thesis investigates the semantic roles of somatisms in English and Uzbek proverbs from a comparative-typological perspective. The study examines how body-part lexemes such as head / bosh, heart / yurak , eye / ko‘z, hand / qo‘l, tongue / til and foot / oyoq function as carriers of figurative meaning, conveying notions of intellect, emotion, action, perception and morality. Drawing on phraseological dictionaries and proverb collections of both languages, the paper identifies recurrent semantic patterns, demonstrates cases of conceptual overlap rooted in universal embodied experience, and highlights culture-specific manifestations conditioned by national worldviews. The findings suggest that, while somatic imagery in proverbs is largely shaped by shared cognitive mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy, each language develops its own paremiological signature reflective of its cultural mentality.