A Cross-Cultural Semantic Analysis Of The Word “Black” In English And “Qora” In Uzbek: From Color To Connotation Urakova Hulkar Abdumalikovna

Аннотация

The lexical item that denotes the basic chromatic category of “black” manifests a remarkable semantic mobility in many languages, migrating from a neutral designation of the darkest colour on the visible spectrum to a dense network of figurative, axiological and culture-specific meanings. Building on approaches from cognitive linguistics, ethnolinguistics and cultural semiotics, the research addresses two objectives: first, to trace the diachronic and synchronic trajectories of literal and figurative meanings of both lexemes; second, to reveal how culturally embedded value systems motivate convergences and divergences in their semantic extensions. A hybrid corpus consisting of the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Uzbek National Corpus, complemented by a manually compiled sub-corpus of folklore, proverbs, media discourse and literary texts, was subjected to qualitative analysis supported by quantitative frequency measures. The findings demonstrate that although both lexemes share core symbolic associations with darkness, secrecy and moral negativity, the Uzbek qora displays a wider range of ambivalent or positive meanings linked to fertility, protection and social hierarchy, whereas English black is more rigidly polarised between negative and reclaimed positive values. The discussion interprets such asymmetries through the prism of cultural metaphor theory and historical contact influences. The study contributes to cross-cultural semantics by illuminating how identical perceptual stimuli generate distinct semantic constellations when refracted through different cultural lenses. Keywords: Colour semantics; connotation; cognitive linguistics; cultural metaphor; lexical polysemy; corpus analysis. bread”, i.e., coarse but wholesome food) and socio- Introduction: Colour terms occupy a privileged position cultural labels such as qorachalik qilmoq (“to be in the linguistic world-view because they originate in devoted as a black servant”). universal perceptual experience while simultaneously absorbing culture-specific evaluations. Among them, Previous scholarship on colour semantics has generally the lexical item denoting “black” enjoys particular proceeded along two lines. A first line, exemplified by prominence, symbolising both the physical absence of Berlin and Kay’s universalist model, proposes that basic light and a rich palette of ideological, emotional and colour categories emerge according to biologically social meanings. In Anglophone discourse the word determined stages, thereby implying cross-linguistic black frequently indexes negativity, danger and equivalence in semantic cores. A second line, advanced mourning, yet it also performs identity-affirming by Wierzbicka, Lakoff, Koptjevskaja-Tamm and others, functions in expressions such as Black Power or Black foregrounds the role of cultural framing and metaphor Lives Matter. The Uzbek word qora, etymologically in motivating divergent semantic developments. cognate with Turkic roots signifying darkness, likewise Studies devoted specifically to black in English establish operates beyond the literal chromatic sphere, its semantic dichotomy between darkness-evil permeating folklore expressions like qora non (“black metaphors and more recent empowerment re- American Journal Of Philological Sciences 173 https://theusajournals.com/index.php/ajps American Journal Of Philological Sciences (ISSN – 2771-2273) evaluations observable in African-American discourse. analysis employed log-likelihood statistics to identify Uzbek linguistics, for its part, has documented the significant lexical partners within a five-word window, symbolic duality of qora, noting its association with thereby revealing entrenched idiomatic patterns. both misfortune and power, yet systematic cross- To contextualise quantitative outputs, qualitative close lingual comparison remains scarce. readings of emblematic utterances were undertaken. The present article addresses this lacuna by juxtaposing In addition, diachronic semantic trajectories were English black and Uzbek qora within a unified reconstructed by consulting etymological dictionaries, methodological design. The comparative vantage point historical texts dating back to Middle English and promises to enrich theoretical models of lexical Chagatai Turkic sources, and secondary literature on polysemy by scrutinising how a seemingly universal religious symbolism in both cultural spheres. The sensory category becomes differentially mapped onto combined procedure allowed a synthesis of empirical moral, social and emotional domains. Furthermore, it distributional evidence with culturally anchored bears practical relevance for translation studies, interpretation, compatible with the cognitive-linguistic intercultural communication and language pedagogy, premise that meaning emerges from usage shaped by where unreflected literal transfers of colour terms shared conceptual metaphors. often generate pr