A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND UZBEK IDIOMS: STRUCTURAL, SEMANTIC AND CULTURAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

This study presents a comparative structural, semantic, and linguocultural analysis of English and Uzbek idioms. Idioms are examined as fixed phraseological units that reflect both universal cognitive mechanisms and culture-specific symbolic systems. The research aims to identify structural patterns, degrees of semantic equivalence, and underlying conceptual metaphors in the two languages. The study employs a qualitative comparative methodology based on phraseological theory developed by Viktor Vinogradov and Charles Bally, as well as conceptual metaphor theory proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson.The corpus consists of 100 idioms (50 English and 50 Uzbek) selected according to frequency, structural stability, figurative meaning, and cultural significance. The analysis includes structural classification, semantic equivalence categorization (full, partial, functional, and culture-specific), and conceptual-metaphorical interpretation.The findings reveal that English idioms predominantly occur in fixed verb phrase constructions, whereas Uzbek idioms demonstrate greater morphological flexibility due to their agglutinative structure. Only 28% of idioms show full equivalence, while the majority display partial or functional correspondence. Both languages rely heavily on body-part and animal metaphors, supporting the embodied cognition model; however, symbolic evaluation remains culturally conditioned. The study concludes that idioms function as linguistic and cultural markers reflecting national worldview and social values. The results have implications for comparative phraseology and intercultural language teaching.