The lexical item that denotes the basic chromatic category of “black” manifests a remarkable semantic mobility in many languages, migrating from a neutral designation of the darkest colour on the visible spectrum to a dense network of figurative, axiological and culture-specific meanings. Building on approaches from cognitive linguistics, ethnolinguistics and cultural semiotics, the research addresses two objectives: first, to trace the diachronic and synchronic trajectories of literal and figurative meanings of both lexemes; second, to reveal how culturally embedded value systems motivate convergences and divergences in their semantic extensions. A hybrid corpus consisting of the British National Corpus, the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the Uzbek National Corpus, complemented by a manually compiled sub-corpus of folklore, proverbs, media discourse and literary texts, was subjected to qualitative analysis supported by quantitative frequency measures. The findings demonstrate that although both lexemes share core symbolic associations with darkness, secrecy and moral negativity, the Uzbek qora displays a wider range of ambivalent or positive meanings linked to fertility, protection and social hierarchy, whereas English black is more rigidly polarised between negative and reclaimed positive values. The discussion interprets such asymmetries through the prism of cultural metaphor theory and historical contact influences. The study contributes to cross-cultural semantics by illuminating how identical perceptual stimuli generate distinct semantic constellations when refracted through different cultural lenses.

Colour semantics, connotation, cognitive linguistics

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