THE SEMANTIC AND STYLISTIC FEATURES OF PROVERBS ABOUT MEN AND WOMEN

This article investigates the semantic and stylistic features of proverbs that describe men and women in the context of anthropocentric and gender linguistics. Proverbs represent the condensed experience and worldview of a nation, and their semantic depth reveals how societies conceptualize gender roles, relationships, and values. The study analyzes how men and women are portrayed in proverbs of the Uzbek and English languages, exploring metaphor, symbolism, contrast, and evaluative semantics as dominant stylistic features. It also examines the evolution of these gendered images in modern linguistic and cultural contexts. The findings show that while many traditional proverbs reflect patriarchal values, they also encode universal human wisdom about cooperation, morality, and harmony between genders.

Keywords: proverb, semantics, stylistics, gender, linguoculture, anthropocentrism, metaphor, stereotype.