Phraseological Units of Mental and Emotional States in Literary Discourse: Cognitive, Cultural and Translational Perspectives (English–Uzbek)

This article examines phraseological units (PUs) that denote mental and emotional states and describes how they are motivated, how they behave in literary discourse and how they are rendered in translation between English and Uzbek. It aims to systematise the criteria by which PUs are delimited and classified, to identify the conceptual models that motivate English and Uzbek PUs of cognition and emotion, and to establish how such units are used creatively in literary texts and what follows for translation. The research is qualitative and contrastive. It combines definitional analysis, conceptual-metaphor analysis, a three-point scale of cross-linguistic equivalence and a stylistic reading of selected passages from Shakespeare. The analysis shows that the two languages share several embodied models, such as KNOWING IS SEEING and HAPPY IS UP, but differ in the bodily loci of feeling and in the images that realise a common model, so that full equivalence is rarer than partial and functional equivalence. In literary texts PUs serve as instruments of characterisation, irony and intertextuality, mainly through instantial changes of form and meaning. It is argued that translators and lexicographers should treat such units at the levels of model, image and discourse function simultaneously.