Holonymic and Meronymic Relations in Uzbek and English Paralinguistic Units: a Contrastive-semantic Analysis
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Part-whole semantic relations, traditionally examined within the nominal lexicon, remain underexplored as an organising principle of paralinguistic and nonverbal sign systems. This article investigates the holonym-meronym (whole-part) phenomenon as it operates in the description of nonverbal communicative behaviour in Uzbek and English, treating the human body and face as holonyms and their communicatively active components (eyes, eyebrows, lips, hands, shoulders) as meronyms that encode discrete paralinguistic meanings. Drawing on an adapted version of the Winston-Chaffin-Herrmann taxonomy of part-whole relations, the study qualitatively analyses authentic examples drawn from English (British National Corpus, Corpus of Contemporary American English) and Uzbek (Oʻzbek tilining milliy korpusi, Ziyouz.com) sources together with literary prose. The analysis identifies systematic cross-linguistic asymmetries in which meronymic units are lexicalised and pragmatically foregrounded as autonomous nonverbal signs, with English privileging manual meronyms and Uzbek foregrounding ocular and facial meronyms bound to culturally specific politeness norms. The findings extend holonymy-meronymy theory beyond concrete nominal taxonomies into the semiotics of nonverbal communication and suggest implications for contrastive linguistics, translation, and English for Specific Purposes instruction.
Author: Melikuziev, Azimjon
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7204698053