Lexical-Semantic Foundations Behind the Formation of Somatic-Component Riddles in English and Uzbek

This study addresses a single question: how does the stock of body-part words feed the making of riddles in English and Uzbek? Adopting a side-by-side method, the author collects riddle texts whose pivotal word denotes a part of the body, files those words into groups based on shared meaning, and follows the two channels – one built on likeness, the other on nearness – through which the name of an organ ends up denoting an ordinary household or working object. The juxtaposition reveals a two-sided result: the impulse to portray the surrounding world by reference to one’s own body returns in both cultures, while the particular organ that is chosen, the object it is mapped onto and the feeling it conveys are decided separately in each language. The conclusions are useful for contrastive lexicology, the study of folklore, translation theory and the teaching of foreign languages.