Pragmatic Features of Phraseological Units Expressing Personality Traits in Literary Discourse

Phraseological units constitute an important expressive resource of literary discourse and play a significant role in the representation of human personality, behaviour, psychological disposition, and interpersonal relations. Their significance in literary texts is determined not only by their stable figurative meanings but also by their pragmatic potential. A phraseological unit expressing a personality trait can simultaneously characterize a fictional person, communicate the narrator's or another character's evaluation, create emotional colouring, establish interpersonal relations, and guide the reader's interpretation of a character. The present article examines the pragmatic features of English phraseological units expressing personality traits in literary discourse, with particular attention to characterization, evaluation, emotional expressiveness, irony, humour, implicature, speech acts, contextual interpretation, and cultural specificity. The analysis demonstrates that phraseological units function as multidimensional pragmatic signs whose interpretation depends on the interaction of conventional meaning and literary context. Particular attention is also paid to the role of phraseological expressions in constructing the linguistic portraits of characters and speakers. The article argues that the pragmatic interpretation of personality-related phraseological units requires consideration of the narrator's perspective, the communicative intentions of characters, contextual information, social relationships, and culturally shared knowledge. The English and Uzbek dimensions are considered comparatively in order to demonstrate that universal personality concepts may receive culturally specific figurative and pragmatic representation.