A Corpus-Based Comparative Study of Phraseological Units Expressing Love and Hatred in English, Russian, and Uzbek Media Discourse

Phraseological units constitute an essential component of media discourse because they communicate emotions, encode culturally grounded interpretations of social relationships, and convey evaluative meanings in a concise and expressive form. Among the semantic categories represented through phraseology, love and hatred are particularly significant because they reflect both private emotional experiences and public attitudes toward individuals, social groups, political actors, and contemporary events. This study aims to investigate the semantic, structural, pragmatic, and linguocultural characteristics of phraseological units expressing love and hatred in English, Russian, and Uzbek media discourse through a comparative corpus-based framework. The research combines phraseological identification, semantic classification, contextual analysis, contrastive comparison, and discourse-pragmatic interpretation. The qualitative pilot analysis considers such English expressions as wear one's heart on one's sleeve, head over heels in love, and no love lost between someone and someone; Russian expressions such as души не чаять в ком-либо and точить зуб на кого-либо; and Uzbek expressions such as кўнгил қўймоқ (ko‘ngil qo‘ymoq), кўрarga кўзи йўқ (ko‘rarga ko‘zi yo‘q), and тиш қайрамоқ (tish qayramoq). These examples illustrate shared tendencies toward metaphorical conceptualization alongside language-specific patterns of emotional expression and evaluation. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which media discourse employs phraseological units to construct intimacy, admiration, rejection, hostility, interpersonal conflict, and ideological opposition. The study proposes a balanced multilingual media corpus and a reproducible annotation procedure for investigating frequency, distribution, collocational behaviour, and pragmatic functions. Since the present analysis does not report results from a completed, quantitatively measured three-language corpus, its comparative findings are qualitative and exploratory rather than statistical. The proposed framework contributes to contrastive phraseology, corpus linguistics, media discourse analysis, and the study of emotion in intercultural communication.