Attitude Toward 'Hospitality' Proverbs in Different Periods: Analysis of Changes and Challenges

Аннотация

Hospitality has long served as a normative moral value in many societies, and proverbs have functioned as concise vehicles for transmitting the ethical prescriptions connected with welcoming a guest. Yet proverbs are not static; their semantic load, pragmatic force, and frequency of use evolve in tandem with wider socio-economic and cultural transformations. This article investigates diachronic shifts in the treatment of “hospitality” proverbs in Uzbek, Russian, and English paremiological corpora covering the late nineteenth century, the Soviet and post- Soviet eras, and the contemporary globalized period. Relying on corpus-based frequency analysis, qualitative semantic comparison, and ethnographic interviews with thirty informants born between 1940 and 2005, the study traces how modernization, collectivist ideology, market reform, and digital communication have each altered both the resonance and the rhetorical deployment of canonical units. Results demonstrate a gradual attenuation of unqualified praise for limitless generosity and a parallel rise in cautionary subtexts that index economic scarcity and privacy concerns. The paper argues that these changes signal a broader recalibration of community boundaries and individual agency. Keywords: Paremiology; hospitality; proverb dynamics; diachronic corpus analysis; cultural values. pragmatic uses of hospitality proverbs shifted from the Introduction: Hospitality, commonly framed as the preindustrial era to the age of social media, and what moral obligation to receive and protect a stranger, has socio-cultural pressures account for these shifts? been codified in folklore across civilizations. Proverbs— short, memorizable statements that encapsulate The investigation combined quantitative and collective wisdom—constitute a principal folkloric qualitative approaches. The diachronic corpus genre through which hospitality norms are rehearsed consisted of three sub-corpora totalling 6.2 million and negotiated. Classic Uzbek sayings such as words: (1) Late-Imperial/Pre-Soviet texts (1860-1917), “Меҳмонни муҳими эмас, мехри муҳим” (“The built from digitized newspapers, ethnographic records, guest’s importance lies not in his rank but in his and proverb collections; (2) Soviet-era sources (1920- warmth”) or Russian maxims like “Гость в дом — Бог в 1990), derived from state-approved anthologies, дом” (“A guest in the house is God in the house”) school readers, and literary journals; (3) Post-1991 crystallize the ideal of open-door generosity. However, materials, including online forums, weblogs, and the apparent timelessness of these dicta masks their contemporary proverb dictionaries. Corpus pre- sensitivity to historical contingencies. Industrialization, processing involved lemmatization and removal of collectivization, urban migration, and digital lifestyles duplicate entries. Hospitality proverbs were isolated via have all challenged traditional obligations regarding keyword search (lemmas “guest,” “митхона,” space, time, and resources. Despite growing interest in “mehman,” “гость,” “hospital-”) and manual proverb functionality, few studies have systematically validation. Relative frequency per million words was mapped how attitudes toward hospitality proverbs calculated to compare prevalence across periods. themselves mutate. Addressing this lacuna, the present To gauge contemporary attitudes, semi-structured research asks: How have semantic emphases and interviews were conducted with ten informants in each American Journal Of Philological Sciences 200 https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN – 2771-2273) linguistic community (Uzbek, Russian, English). The contraction in frequency and the rise of ambivalent Participants were recruited through purposive hospitality proverbs coincide with socio-economic sampling to ensure generational diversity and balanced transitions that recalibrate resource distribution and gender representation. They were asked to recall privacy norms. In Central Asia, Soviet collectivism hospitality proverbs, interpret their meanings, and institutionalized communal living, temporarily comment on their relevance in modern life. Interviews reinforcing open-door customs. Yet post-Soviet were transcribed and coded thematically using NVivo. marketization encouraged nuclear family enclaves and Ethical clearance was obtained from the university monetized surplus space, diminishing the practical review board; all participants gave informed consent. feasibility of unconditional generosity. The semantic drift toward reciprocity mirrors Marcel Mauss’s Finally, semantic shift analysis combined historical argument that gift exchange is rarely free of dictionary comparison with frame semantics to identify anticipatory return; under neoliberal pressures, this changes in evaluative polarity, agency assignment, and latent expectation surfaces explicitly in discourse. conditionality (e.g., unconditional vs. reci