SEMANTIC-FUNCTIONAL FIELDS, STYLISTIC-SEMANTIC DEVICES AND DISCURSIVE DYNAMICS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK FOOTBALL COMMENTARY: A CONTRASTIVE STUDY

The language of sports commentary represents a distinctive form of media discourse in which description, evaluation, interpretation and emotional involvement are produced simultaneously under severe time constraints. Football commentary is particularly significant in this regard because the commentator is required to verbalize rapidly changing events, identify participants, evaluate actions, interpret tactical developments and maintain continuous contact with an audience that is often watching the same event. The present article investigates the semantic-functional, field-based, stylistic-semantic and discursive characteristics of English and Uzbek football commentary from a contrastive perspective. The analysis focuses on three interconnected dimensions: the semantic-functional organization of lexical and phraseological units characteristic of sports commentators’ speech; the comparative realization of stylistic and semantic devices; and the discursive dynamics through which live commentary develops in accordance with changes in the match situation. The study argues that the lexical organization of football commentary can be represented as a system of interconnected semantic-functional fields, including action and movement, spatial orientation, competition, evaluation, emotion, result, tactical organization and participant identification. Although English and Uzbek commentaries share a common conceptual basis determined by the universal structure of football, their linguistic realization differs because of typological, cultural and media-discursive factors. English commentary tends to demonstrate a higher degree of lexical compression, terminological conventionalization, elliptical syntax and compact evaluative formulas, whereas Uzbek commentary frequently combines international football terminology with explanatory constructions, nationally marked evaluative units and emotionally intensified expressions. Stylistic devices such as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, repetition, epithet, comparison, rhetorical questions and exclamatory constructions contribute not only to expressiveness but also to the semantic framing of sporting events.