PHRASEOLOGICAL FEATURES OF COMPOUND NOUNS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

This study investigates the phraseological features of compound nouns in English and Uzbek from a comparative perspective. Despite growing scholarly attention to phraseology in both languages, limited research has addressed the specific role of compound nouns within phraseological systems across typologically distinct languages. The present study adopts a descriptive-comparative research design, combining qualitative semantic analysis with quantitative structural classification. A purposive sample of 120 compound-noun-based phraseological units (60 English, 60 Uzbek) was drawn from established phraseological dictionaries and corpus data. The analytical framework encompasses structural modeling (identifying productive morphological patterns such as N+N, Adj+N, V+N, and dephrasal compounds), semantic analysis (examining processes of idiomatization, metaphorization, and lexicalization), and cross-linguistic comparison (classifying equivalence types as full, partial, or zero). Results indicate that while both languages exploit similar structural templates for compound-noun phraseological units, they diverge significantly in the degree of semantic opacity, metaphorical mapping strategies, and the availability of cross-linguistic equivalents. The N+N model emerged as the most productive pattern in both languages, yet Uzbek demonstrates greater reliance on agglutinative morphological processes in phraseologization. The findings underscore the influence of typological structure and cultural worldview on phraseological compound formation and offer implications for bilingual lexicography and foreign language pedagogy.