Pragmalinguistic Features of Collocations in Literary Texts: A Comparative Study of English and Uzbek Languages
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Abstract
The present study investigates the pragmalinguistic features of collocations in English and Uzbek literary texts through a cross-linguistic perspective. Despite the growing body of research on collocations focusing on semantic and structural properties, the pragmatic side of the phenomenon – how collocations encode culture, emotion, and speech context – should be explored in more detail, especially from a contrastive perspective involving two typologically and culturally different languages, such as English and Uzbek. To achieve this goal, the study is conducted using a corpus-based methodology and qualitative pragmatic analysis involving the works of Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Abdulla Qodiriy, and Oybek. Following Sinclair’s method, collocations were identified using Hoey and Leech’s approaches, focusing on their communicative and cultural functions. The results of the study indicate that English literary collocations show higher creative flexibility employing different stylistic devices, such as irony, defamiliarisation, or a higher degree of emotionality, through a change in the traditional meaning of words, while Uzbek literary collocations are characterised by their higher degree of formulaic stability and culture-specific references symbolising collective values, intertextual traditions, and metaphorical expressions rooted in the Persian-Arabic heritage. The findings indicate that differ on their pragmatic mechanisms, where the English language prioritizes linguistic innovation and the creation of a personal style in the context of individual writing, and the Uzbek language is based on the experience of a culturally stable set of speech associations inherent in the collectivity. Such notions stress that translation of collocations should not only be based on semantic considerations but also on the acquisition of a certain level of collocational culture as a part of achieving communicative and cultural competence.
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