A CORPUS-BASED LEXICAL-SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC COMPARISON OF YESTERDAY IN ENGLISH AND KECHA IN UZBEK

Abstract

Temporal expressions play an important role in human communication because they enable speakers to locate events in relation to the time of speaking. Among such expressions, English yesterday and Uzbek kecha are particularly important because both primarily refer to the day immediately preceding the day of speech. However, despite their apparent semantic equivalence, their actual use in discourse may demonstrate differences in syntactic position, semantic extension, contextual interpretation, and pragmatic function. This study presents a corpus-based comparative analysis of yesterday in English and kecha in Uzbek. The Uzbek data are based on examples retrieved from the Uzbek National Corpus, where kecha occurs 148 times in the analysed material. The English examples are drawn from British English corpus data. The analysis focuses on three major dimensions: lexical-semantic meaning, syntactic distribution, and discourse function. The findings show that the two temporal deictic expressions share a basic temporal meaning and frequently occur with past-tense predicates. Both can function as independent temporal adverbials and can modify propositions referring to completed events.