Grammatical Categories and Derivational Features in the Semantic Scope of Speech Verbs: A Contrastive Analysis of Uzbek and English

This article investigates the influence of grammatical categories and derivational features on the semantic scope of speech verbs in Uzbek and English within a contrastive linguistics framework. Drawing on a corpus of 1,200 naturally occurring utterances from literary and journalistic sources in both languages, the study examines how morphological processes — including affixation, conversion, and compounding — expand or restrict the referential, modal, and illocutionary dimensions of speech verbs. The analysis reveals that Uzbek, as an agglutinative language, encodes a broader range of semantic nuances through bound morphemes directly attached to verbal roots, whereas English relies more heavily on syntactic and lexical strategies. Tense, aspect, voice, and modality markers are shown to interact with derivational patterns to produce systematic shifts in the semantic scope of verbs denoting communication, reporting, and verbal performance. These findings contribute to a more precise understanding of the grammar–semantics interface and have implications for translation studies, natural language processing, and cross-linguistic pedagogy.