LEXICAL-SEMANTIC FOUNDATIONS BEHIND THE FORMATION OF SOMATIC-COMPONENT RIDDLES IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

The present paper looks into how body-part vocabulary supplies the lexical and semantic raw material out of which riddles are built in English and Uzbek. Working within a contrastive framework, the author gathers riddle texts whose key word names a part of the body, sorts those key words into meaning-based clusters, and traces the two transfer routes – one resting on resemblance, the other on adjacency – by which an organ name comes to stand for some everyday object. The comparison suggests a double picture: the underlying habit of describing the world by way of one’s own body recurs in both traditions, yet which organ is chosen, what object it points to, and what emotional colouring it carries are settled differently in each language. These observations bear on contrastive lexicology, folklore scholarship, the theory of translation, and the teaching of foreign languages.