THE CONCEPT OF "UNIQUENESS" (O'ZIGA XOSLIGI / O'ZIGA XOSLIG') IN THE ENGLISH AND UZBEK LINGUISTIC PICTURES OF THE WORLD: A COGNITIVE-LINGUISTIC AND LINGUOCULTURAL ANALYSIS

The article is devoted to the study of the concept of “uniqueness / peculiarity” — Uzbek o‘ziga xoslik — in the English and Uzbek linguistic cultures within the framework of cognitive linguistics and linguoculturology. The relevance of the research is determined by the growing interest of modern linguistic science in the processes of conceptualization of the human inner world and by the practical necessity of describing value-loaded concepts in typologically different languages. The aim of the article is to identify the semantic, figurative and axiological peculiarities of the representation of the concept under study in English and Uzbek idioms and paremias, as well as to establish convergent and divergent features of its verbalization in the two linguistic cultures. The material of the research comprises a continuously sampled corpus of 100 phraseological units and paremias (50 English and 50 Uzbek), explanatory dictionaries of both languages, and the works of classical and modern authors. The following methods are used: definitional analysis, componential analysis, contextological analysis, the method of linguocultural interpretation, and the comparative-typological method. The results show that “uniqueness” is a value concept in both cultures, yet its cultural scripts differ: the English concept is dominated by the script of SELF-DISTINCTION (standing out of the crowd), whereas the Uzbek concept is dominated by the scripts of SELF-KNOWLEDGE and HARMONY-IN-UNIQUENESS. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the fact that the concept of o‘ziga xoslik has been described for the first time in a comparative English–Uzbek aspect on the material of idioms and paremias.