SEMANTIC AND CONTEXTUAL VARIATION OF PHILOSOPHICAL-CONCEPTUAL POLYSEMOUS LEXEMES IN UZBEK AND ENGLISH
Keywords:
polysemy, parallel corpus, contextual semantics, contrastive linguistics, translation equivalent, semantic mirrors, Shannon entropy, word sense disambiguation, philosophical discourse.Abstract
The paper presents a contrastive, parallel-corpus-based study of the contextual and semantic behaviour of polysemous lexemes carrying philosophical-conceptual content in Uzbek and English. The material is a sentence-aligned bilingual corpus of 254 units compiled from Chapters VII–VIII of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (4,273 Uzbek and 5,639 English tokens). Four quantitative measures are proposed for polysemy — the translation-variability coefficient, Shannon entropy, sense dominance and semantic asymmetry — together with a 12-table PostgreSQL database that computes them automatically. English conceptual lexemes have on average 3.44 and Uzbek ones 4.00 translation equivalents, giving an asymmetry coefficient of A = 0.075. Of all equivalences, 87.3 % are partial, 10.1 % zero and 2.5 % phraseological.
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