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Abstract
This study investigates the representation of existential meaning in English and Uzbek from a cross-linguistic conceptual-semantic perspective. Drawing on Cognitive Grammar and conceptual semantics (Langacker, 2008; Jackendoff, 1990) as well as discourse-based analyses of existential constructions (Ward & Birner, 1995; McNally, 2016), the research examines how existence is encoded structurally and conceptually in two typologically distinct languages. The analysis is based on data extracted from the British National Corpus (Aston & Burnard, 1998), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (Davies, 2008), and a curated dataset of contemporary Uzbek texts and elicited native-speaker judgments.
The findings demonstrate that while both languages share a common conceptual core grounded in notions of presence and spatial anchoring, they diverge in their grammatical realization of existential meaning. English primarily employs a syntactic presentational construction (there + be + NP), which packages hearer-new information within a discourse-sensitive structure. Uzbek, by contrast, encodes existential meaning through lexical predication, most notably via bor/yo‘q and nominal predicate constructions, without the use of a dummy subject.
The study argues that existential constructions across the two languages instantiate comparable conceptual primitives but differ in surface encoding strategies. These results contribute to conceptual-semantic theory, contrastive linguistics, and have practical implications for translation and language pedagogy.
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