COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE FUNCTIONAL-SEMANTIC FIELD OF ENDEARMENT IN FRENCH AND UZBEK: OBJECT ORIENTATION, SOCIOLINGUISTIC AND GENDER FACTORS

Abstract

This article offers a comparative analysis of the functional semantic field of endearment in French and Uzbek, focusing on object orientation, sociolinguistic conditioning, and gender factors. The study aims to explain how endearing forms encode affect while simultaneously indexing social distance, interactional roles, and communicative control. The methodology integrates functional semantics, pragmalinguistics, and discourse analysis. The empirical basis is a purpose built corpus drawn from contemporary fiction, dramatic dialogues, media texts, and fragments of everyday speech. The results demonstrate that endearment devices operate beyond intimacy marking: they also serve mitigation, stance management, and status and group membership indexing. The main contribution lies in showing that object orientation is constrained by different semantic and cultural parameters across the two languages, and that gender linked preferences are not fixed but interact with genre and situational norms, producing context dependent distributions. These findings refine the cross linguistic description of affective address and provide implications for translation and intercultural communication.