CORPUS-BASED STUDY OF ILLNESS AND DISEASE EUPHEMISMS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

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Abstract

This paper presents a comparative corpus-based statistical analysis of euphemistic language used to describe illness and disease in English and Uzbek. Employing two balanced, genre-stratified comparable corpora of 80,000 words each — drawn from clinical consultation records, medical journalism, patient narratives, institutional health communication, and social media health discourse — the study identifies, classifies, and quantifies illness euphemisms across five typological categories: lexical, semantic extension, phraseological, cultural/traditional, and pragmatic. The methodology integrates corpus querying, keyness analysis, native speaker verification (n = 12 per language), and a battery of statistical procedures (chi-square, log-likelihood ratio, Fisher’s exact test, binary logistic regression). Results reveal a significant cross-linguistic asymmetry: Uzbek illness euphemisms occur at 36.24 per 10,000 words compared to 19.88 per 10,000 words in English, a ratio of 1.82 (χ² = 38.91, df = 4, p < 0.0001, Cramér’s V = 0.39). Cultural/traditional euphemisms show the highest asymmetry (ratio 3.19), driven by the integration of Islamic medical ethics, Tibb-ul-Nabawi (Prophetic medicine), and Uzbek humoral healing traditions into everyday illness discourse. The findings contribute to applied linguistics, cross-cultural health communication, and medical interpreter training, with six targeted practical recommendations.

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