SEMANTIC SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

This article examines semantic similarities and differences between English and Uzbek from a comparative linguistic perspective. The study focuses on lexical meaning, polysemy, synonymy, antonymy, metaphorical extension, cultural semantics, and context-dependent interpretation. English and Uzbek belong to different language families: English is a Germanic language of the Indo-European family, while Uzbek is a Turkic language. Because of this typological difference, the two languages demonstrate different grammatical structures, word-formation models, and semantic organization. However, they also share universal semantic features because both languages reflect general human cognition, social experience, emotional perception, and communicative needs. The purpose of this article is to identify major areas where English and Uzbek show semantic similarity and divergence. The research uses a descriptive-comparative method and analyzes examples from everyday vocabulary, abstract concepts, kinship terms, emotional words, metaphorical expressions, and culturally specific lexical units. The results show that similarities are mostly observed in universal conceptual fields such as family, nature, body, emotion, time, space, and social relations. Differences are more visible in culturally marked vocabulary, politeness expressions, kinship terminology, word connotation, metaphorical models, and the semantic range of certain lexical items. The studyconcludes that semantic comparison of English and Uzbek is important for translation, intercultural communication, foreign language teaching, and the development of comparative linguistics.