A Corpus-Assisted Linguocultural Analysis of Character-Related Wise Sayings in English and Uzbek Fiction

This article examines how character-related wise sayings are selected, framed, and made culturally meaningful in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Abdulla Qodiriy's O‘tkan kunlar. A small comparable corpus was compiled from public-domain electronic texts, comprising 122,000 English tokens and 89,158 Uzbek tokens. Candidate units were retrieved through a hybrid procedure that combined lexical seeds, generalising constructions, and traditionalising markers with close contextual reading. Fifty-seven units met the operational definition of a self-contained proverbial, aphoristic, or maxim-like statement that evaluates a relatively stable human disposition or socially consequential conduct. The English subcorpus contained 30 units (2.46 per 10,000 tokens), while the Uzbek subcorpus contained 27 (3.03 per 10,000). Frequency alone therefore showed only a modest difference. The stronger contrast concerned cultural packaging. In the English text, 16 of 30 items concerned self-regulation and inner disposition, and only one unit was introduced as an inherited saying. In the Uzbek text, evaluative domains were more evenly distributed, including communal ethics, experience, reciprocity, and self-mastery; 16 of 27 units carried an overt traditionalising or authoritative frame such as emish, deydirlar, deganlar, bobolar, maqol, or a cited hadith. In both novels, most units occurred in character speech, where they functioned not as detachable moral truths but as acts of self-presentation, persuasion, rebuke, consolation, and irony. The findings support a corpus-assisted view in which quantitative retrieval and close reading are mutually corrective. They also show that character-related wisdom in fiction is culturally distinctive less because one tradition is more proverbial than the other than because each assigns authority to evaluation differently.