THEMATIC-SEMANTIC CLASSIFICATION OF NOMINATIVE EXTERNAL APPEARANCE DESCRIPTIONS AND THEIR FIGURATIVE COMPONENTS

The article offers a comparative linguocultural analysis of how human appearance is expressed in Russian and Uzbek paremias.
Most of them draw on phraseological units or set similes, and none compare Russian with Uzbek. To classify the paremiological
material, three independent but interrelated criteria are proposed: the object of description, the figurative component and the
axiological vector. Five cultural codes are identified by figurative component: somatic, zoonymic and ornithonymic, phytonymic,
artefactual, and natural or cosmic images. The analysis shows that zoomorphic and phytomorphic codes carry opposite
evaluations in the two languages. In Russian proverbs, animal imagery mostly marks ugliness and foolishness.