SEMANTIC EXTENSION OF CORE AGRICULTURAL VERBS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

This article examines the semantic extension of core agricultural verbs in English and Uzbek from a cognitive-semantic perspective. Nine pairs of verbs denoting the basic stages of the farming cycle – sowing, ploughing, cultivating, grafting, weeding, reaping, harvesting, threshing and winnowing – are analysed on the basis of explanatory, etymological and phraseological dictionaries of both languages. The study identifies the mechanisms (metaphor, metonymy and specialisation) through which these verbs acquire abstract meanings and classifies the resulting senses into semantic domains such as causation, consequence, nurturing, selection, destruction and waste. The results show that the two languages converge where the extension is grounded in the shared conceptual metaphor IDEAS / ACTIONS ARE PLANTS, but diverge in the aspect of the agricultural scene that is profiled: English tends to foreground the retained product and the effort involved, whereas Uzbek more often foregrounds the driving force, the loss and the tending process. The findings are relevant to contrastive lexicology, bilingual lexicography and translation practice.