MORPHOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION AND LEXICAL-SEMANTIC CHARACTERISTICS OF SPORTS TERMS AND LEXEMES IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK: A CONTRASTIVE-TYPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

The rapid globalization of physical culture and competitive athletics has catalyzed the prolific expansion of sports terminology, transforming it into one of the most dynamic, porous, and highly specialized lexical sub-systems in modern linguistics. This scientific article undertakes an exhaustive contrastive-typological investigation into the morphological classification and lexical-semantic characteristics of sports terms and lexemes in two structurally divergent languages: English, an analytical Germanic language serving as the primary global donor of athletic nomenclature, and Uzbek, an agglutinative Turkic language balancing native word-formation constraints with massive waves of international lexical borrowing. By systematically interrogating the structural-morphemic architectures and semantic matrices of sports lexemes, this study demonstrates how English relies on high-velocity functional shifts (zero-derivation), extreme compound compression, and highly productive suffixation (e.g., -er, -ing) to codify kinetic reality into static lexical tokens, whereas Uzbek employs rule-governed agglutinative suffixation (e.g., -chi, -ish), syntactic possessive phrasing, and the structural re-analysis of imported Anglicisms. Furthermore, the research delves deeply into the lexical-semantic dimensions of sports discourse, mapping phenomena such as transterminologization, semantic narrowing and broadening, and the pervasive cultural metaphorization of sports vocabulary. Special attention is devoted to the semantic mutations of English borrowings in the Uzbek linguistic environment—where terms like "jogging" and "tennis" shift from denoting activities to encompassing athletic apparel and footwear—and the internationalization of culturally specific Uzbek sports concepts, such as traditional kurash. Ultimately, the findings reveal that while global sports media imposes a universalizing conceptual framework, the actual verbalization of sport remains deeply governed by the idiosyncratic morphological typologies and historical-cultural cognitive models inherent to each specific language system.