Selective phraseologization of an evaluative image: the dog in English, Russian and Uzbek idioms and proverbs

Cross-linguistic differences in the evaluation of animal images are routinely explained by differences in cultural attitude. This study argues that such an account conflates two distinct things -the stock of cultural ideas about an animal available in a speech community, and the subset of those ideas admitted into the idiom inventory -and tests them separately. A corpus of 131 idioms containing the zoonym dog / собака / ит (67 English, 44 Russian, 20 Uzbek) was compiled by exhaustive search of authoritative phraseological dictionaries and classified on a four-term evaluative scale, with intensifiers set apart; a separate database of 429 proverbs (76 English, 182 Russian, 171 Uzbek) served as contrast material, the idiom/proverb boundary being drawn by an explicit operational criterion. Positively evaluated idioms form a descending gradient -English 9, Russian 1, Uzbek 0 -which survives both a stricter classification of contested units and a stricter definition of idiomhood. At the proverb level the ordering is reversed: Russian has the highest share of positive items (16.5 %), well above English (7.9 %). The difference between levels is +5.5 percentage points in English but -14.2 in Russian and -9.4 in Uzbek. The locus of cross-linguistic variation is therefore not the cultural stock but the filter governing entry into the idiom inventory. We term this selective phraseologization.

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