Identifying Phraseological Lacunae In English And Uzbek Youth Speech: Methodology And Cross-Linguistic Implications
Keywords:
phraseological lacunae, youth speech, English, Uzbek, contrastive linguistics, corpus linguistics, idiom equivalence, lexical gapAbstract
Phraseological lacunae — culturally bound gaps in idiomatic equivalence between languages — represent one of the most persistent challenges in contrastive linguistics and second-language acquisition. This study presents a systematic methodology for identifying, classifying, and analysing phraseological lacunae specific to youth speech in English and Uzbek. Drawing on a corpus of 2,840 phraseological units (PUs) collected from social-media discourse, conversational interviews, and digital text corpora between 2022 and 2024, we apply a four-stage identification protocol combining corpus-driven frequency analysis, native-speaker elicitation tasks, and expert panel validation. Results reveal that 62.2% of English youth phraseology has no direct Uzbek equivalent, while 62.4% of Uzbek youth PUs remain lacunar in English. Domain analysis shows the highest lacunarity in the semantic fields of emotional nuance (41.2%), social hierarchy (37.8%), and digital-culture expression (52.6%). The study proposes a taxonomic framework of four lacuna types — absolute, partial, stylistic, and pragmatic — and discusses pedagogical and translation implications. The methodology offers a replicable model applicable to other language pairs that share significant typological distance.
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