Before or After the Deed? Prospective and Retrospective Moral Evaluation in Uzbek and English
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: . A moral judgement can be passed before an act, to prevent it, or after it, to condemn it. This article examines how Uzbek and English encode this timing in the vocabulary and constructions of shame, honour, fairness and conscience. The Uzbek material covers uyat (“shame”), or-nomus (“honour”), hayo (“modesty”), insof (“fairness”), diyonat (“integrity”), iymon (“faith”) and vijdon (“conscience”); the English material covers shame, honour, honesty, faith, conscience and guilt. Data come from explanatory, etymological, phraseological, idiom and proverb dictionaries and from two fiction collections compiled by the author (Uzbek 1,278,225 words, English 1,019,718 words). Each construction is described by its grammatical form, the presence or absence of an experiencer and an addressee, and its orientation in time. The central Uzbek regulative formula uyat bo’ladi (“it will be shameful”) is impersonal and prospective: it names no one who will feel shame and stops an act that has not yet happened. Fairness is requested in advance in optative prayers in which God is the giver. The English formulas for shame! and shame on you! are addressed to a person and judge a completed act, and I was quite ashamed reports a past discomfort of the self. Frequencies show that both languages name shame often and that English guilt is rare, so the contrast between the two languages lies not in the amount of shame but in its timing and ownership.
Language: English
Topic: Language and Culture
Subfield: Linguistics and Language
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225402403