SHARED DOMAINS, OPPOSITE OPERATIONS: IMAGERY IN GENDER-MARKED PROVERBS OF RUSSIAN AND UZBEK
Keywords:
paremiology; image domain; conceptual metaphor; gender; contrastive linguistics; Uzbek; RussianAbstract
Contrastive studies of proverbial imagery usually proceed by comparing inventories: which source domains a tradition draws on, and how large each domain is. This paper argues that inventory comparison is the wrong instrument for the gender domain, because the inventories largely coincide while the work the domains perform does not. Drawing on a corpus of 628 gender-marked proverbial units (328 Russian, 300 Uzbek) annotated with a seven-slot frame model, the study examines three domains productive in both traditions: dwelling and space, the human body, and animal imagery. In each case the source domain is shared and the operation carried out through it is opposed. The dwelling domain organises Russian units by the principle of boundary and Uzbek units by the principle of occupancy. The body domain supplies a vertical, hierarchical ordering in Russian and admits alongside it a symmetrical, paired ordering in Uzbek. Animal imagery performs categorial exclusion in Russian and comparison of qualities in Uzbek. It follows that the unit of contrastive comparison should be the operation rather than the domain, and that two traditions may share their entire figurative stock while agreeing on almost nothing that is done with it.
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