Linguistic representation of social fear in Abdulla Qodiriy’s O‘tkan kunlar and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The scarlet letter

Fear, as a culturally loaded emotional concept, is encoded through language in distinct ways across literary traditions. This study compares the linguistic representation of fear in Abdulla Qodiriy’s O‘tkan kunlar (Uzbek, 1926) and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (American, 1850) through lexical-semantic, metaphorical, and stylistic analysis. Special attention is given to expressions of social fear—fear of public judgment, shame, punishment, and moral evaluation. Data include fear-related lexical units, idioms, culturally significant formulae, metaphors, and syntactic patterns. Findings reveal that Uzbek discourse foregrounds collective social surveillance and honor-based shame through formulaic expressions such as “el nima deydi,” “uyat,” “sharm,” “nomus,” “vijdon qiynadi”, while Puritan discourse emphasizes internal moral struggle and divine justice, expressed through lexemes such as guilt, dread, conscience, shame, sorrow, anguish, and symbolic imagery like the scarlet letter, scaffold, dark forest, fire. Linguistic evidence suggests two emotion models: collectivist honor-fear discourse vs individual moral-guilt discourse. The study contributes to cross-cultural stylistics and emotion linguistics by showing how fear is not merely psychological but linguistically and culturally constructed.