FROM CORE MEANING TO REGISTER-SPECIFIC PROFILING: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF THE MILK/SUT LEXICAL-SEMANTIC FIELD IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

This article investigates the lexical-semantic organization and register-specific profiling of the MILK/SUT field in English and Uzbek. A core-periphery and componential analysis was applied to 93 nominative units (49 English; 44 Uzbek), while 14 attested contexts provided balanced evidence from seven functional environments. The core consists only of milk and sut; the pre-core and proximate periphery contain 72.0% of the registry. Multiword nominations account for 57.0%, showing that source, composition, processing, and function are commonly encoded through specification. English favours noun premodification, compounding, and conversion, whereas Uzbek more often uses possessive structures, suffixation, descriptive combinations, and independent dairy-product names. Across scientific-popular, legal, culinary, literary, conversational, economic, and advertising texts, reference remains comparatively stable while grammatical role and evaluative framing change. The results show that bilingual equivalence must be established at sense and context level, particularly for yogurt/qatiq, buttermilk/ayron, and curd/suzma.