Similarities and Differences of Polysemy in |English and Uzbek

Polysemy, the phenomenon whereby a single lexical item possesses multiple related meanings, is a universal feature of natural languages and a central topic in lexical semantics. This article explores the similarities and differences of polysemy in English and Uzbek, two languages that belong to distinct language families and typological groups. English, a Germanic language within the Indo-European family, is characterized by its analytic structure and relatively fixed word order. Uzbek, a Turkic language, is agglutinative in nature and exhibits rich morphological marking. Despite these structural differences, both languages demonstrate extensive use of polysemy as a means of lexical expansion, semantic economy, and conceptual categorization.