THE STUDY OF IDIOMATIC COMPOUNDS IN THE LINGUO-COGNITIVE ASPECT: EVIDENCE FROM ENGLISH AND UZBEK
Keywords:
idiomatic compounds, cognitive linguistics, metaphor, metonymy, conceptual blending, phraseology, English, Uzbek, cultural semantics, embodiment.Abstract
This article investigates idiomatic compounds in English and Uzbek from a linguo-cognitive perspective. Idiomatic compounds are understood as complex lexical formations whose meanings are not fully predictable from the meanings of their individual components, yet remain conceptually motivated through metaphor, metonymy, embodiment, categorization, and conceptual blending. The study is grounded in cognitive linguistics and phraseology, where language is viewed as a symbolic system reflecting human conceptualization, cultural experience, and conventionalized patterns of meaning.
The research addresses a gap in contrastive linguistic studies, since idiomatic compounds have rarely been examined as a separate object of analysis in English-Uzbek comparison. While idioms and figurative expressions have been widely studied, compound-based idiomatic units require more systematic attention, especially in relation to cultural semantics and cognitive mechanisms. The methodology is based on comparative lexical-semantic analysis. Idiomatic compounds are selected from English and Uzbek lexicographic and corpus-informed sources and analyzed according to their structural type, degree of idiomaticity, cognitive mechanism, source domain, target domain, evaluative meaning, and cultural anchoring. The study shows that metaphor is one of the leading mechanisms in the formation of idiomatic compound meaning, while metonymy and conceptual blending also play an important role. English idiomatic compounds tend to express social categorization and person-typing, whereas Uzbek idiomatic compounds frequently rely on body-part imagery, color symbolism, and moral evaluation.
The findings suggest that idiomatic compounds should not be treated as arbitrary lexical exceptions, but as culturally embedded conceptual compressions. The proposed framework may be useful for cognitive linguistics, contrastive phraseology, bilingual lexicography, translation studies, language pedagogy, and figurative-language processing in multilingual contexts.
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