Affixes in the Uzbek Language and Their Semantic Load

Abstract

This article explores the role of affixation in the Uzbek language with particular focus on the semantic load carried by different types of affixes—derivational, inflectional, and evaluative. As a member of the Turkic language family, Uzbek relies heavily on agglutination, where suffixes are linearly added to root morphemes to form complex meanings. This study investigates how affixes not only serve grammatical functions but also convey rich semantic and pragmatic information, including speaker attitude, social deixis, modality, and intensity. By analyzing a range of suffixes in authentic written and spoken texts, this research demonstrates the expressive power of affixation in Uzbek. Through a combination of morphological analysis and corpus-based data, the paper identifies affix patterns that contribute significantly to meaning expansion and word formation productivity. The findings have implications for linguistic theory, lexicography, language pedagogy, and computational morphology, highlighting how affixal semantics shapes lexical development and discourse functions in Uzbek.