THEORETICAL PROBLEMS IN CONSTRUCTING A COGNITIVE-SEMANTIC MODEL OF POLYSEMANTIC WORDS (On the Material of Uzbek Lexis)

• Aziza Suvonova

  Author

• M. Sadullaeva

  Author

Traditional Uzbek linguistics has largely approached polysemy as a ready-made inventory of dictionary meanings produced through metaphor and metonymy. This paper argues that treating polysemous words merely as lists of lexicalised senses fails to capture the internal, systematic organisation of meaning in the speaker’s mind. Drawing on the systemic tradition in Uzbek linguistics (Jamolxonov; Ne’matov and Rasulov) and on cognitive semantics (Lakoff; Langacker), the study examines the theoretical difficulties involved in building a cognitive-semantic model of polysemantic words on the material of Uzbek lexis. Through the analysis of everyday Uzbek examples — the nouns tuz “salt” and bel “waist”, the pair achchiq “bitter” / shirin “sweet”, and the idiom boshi aylandi “to feel dizzy / to be bewildered” — it shows that the several senses of a word are not accidental homonyms but form a motivated, prototype-centred network grounded in embodied and culturally specific experience. The paper concludes that combining the systemic and cognitive frameworks offers a more adequate account of how polysemy is structured in the mind of the Uzbek speaker.

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