LEXICAL MEANS OF EXPRESSING CAUSE-EFFECT RELATIONS IN MODERN KARAKALPAK: A FUNCTIONAL-SEMANTIC FIELD APPROACH

Studies of causality in Karakalpak have concentrated on grammar: conjunctions, subordinate clauses, case endings and causative affixes. Yet a good part of the work of expressing cause and effect is done by words with their own lexical meaning: nouns such as sebep "cause," nátiyje "result," saldar "consequence" and aqıbet "outcome," and verbal phrases such as sebep bolıw "to be the cause of," alıp keliw "to lead to" and tuwdırıw "to give rise to." This article describes the lexical layer of the cause-effect field in modern Karakalpak on the basis of the explanatory dictionary of the Karakalpak language and examples from T. Qayıpbergenov's novel Qaraqalpaq dástanı. Maman biy ápsanası. Using component, contextual, valency and functional-semantic analysis, it identifies six groups of lexical units: core cause nouns, nouns denoting the causer, nouns denoting effect and consequence, peripheral nouns of ground and pretext, verbal-analytic units of causation, and units that have moved toward grammatical connectives. The analysis shows that the three result nouns differ systematically (nátiyje is neutral and associated with controlled processes, saldar with influences outside the subject's will, and aqıbet with final, often negatively evaluated outcomes), and that the sebep family forms a continuum from a full noun to the connective sebebi and the postposition-like sebepli and sebebinen. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the first semantic-functional classification of Karakalpak causal vocabulary and in the description of its grammaticalisation as a gradual transition rather than a binary split. The results show that lexical choice determines which component of a causal situation is brought into focus, how strongly the link is asserted, and how the speaker evaluates it.