Auditory Phraseological Units in English and Uzbek: Structural Models, Equivalence, and Cultural Asymmetry

Abstract

This article examines auditory phraseological units in English and Uzbek with attention to structural models, degrees of equivalence, and culturally conditioned asymmetry. The material was selected from A. V. Kunin’s English-Russian phraseological dictionary and Sh. Rahmatullayev’s dictionary of Uzbek phraseology. The analyzed corpus contains 98 English and 156 Uzbek units associated with hearing, listening, the ear, and the reception of verbal information. Contrastive, componential, structural-semantic, pragmatic, and statistical methods were applied. The study distinguishes close structural-semantic equivalents, functional equivalents with different imagery, partial correspondences, and units without a regular counterpart. English auditory phraseology is represented by nine recurrent structural models, whereas Uzbek material is concentrated in six models, particularly noun-plus-verb constructions. Symmetric units constitute 69 of the 98 English items and 129 of the 156 Uzbek items. The findings demonstrate that phraseological equivalence depends not only on denotative meaning but also on internal image, communicative intention, grammatical form, stylistic coloring, and cultural knowledge.