Publication Details
Abstract
This article aims to contribute to the theory of phraseology by exploring the conceptual organization of English and Uzbek verbal phraseological units. The present study concentrates on verbal phraseological units encoding domains such as emotion, assistance, self-control, attention, difficulty, social cooperation, hope, and disappointment. Particular attention is paid to phraseological meaning, image schemas, embodied experience, conventionalized imagery, and the contribution of the verbal constituent to overall meaning. The comparison between English and Uzbek verbal phraseological units is carried out through items such as hit the ceiling, lend a hand, lose one’s head, turn a blind eye, open one’s heart, and come to a dead end, alongside their Uzbek counterparts qoni qaynamoq, qo‘l uzatmoq, boshini yo‘qotmoq, ko‘z yummoq, ko‘nglini ochmoq, and boshberk ko‘chaga kirib qolmoq. The study reveals that conceptual correspondence does not always lead to phraseological equivalence. Three types of conceptual correspondence were identified: phraseological units with conceptual and figurative correspondence, phraseological units with conceptual correspondence and imagistic dissimilarity, and phraseological units with culturally specific conceptualization. Particular attention is drawn to the conceptual contribution of the verbal constituent, which tends to conceptualize various scenarios of movement, loss, transition, opening, closing, direction, or change. The article provides a cognitive framework and model for analyzing the conceptual structure of verbal phraseological units in English and Uzbek.