REGISTER STRATIFICATION IN ALISHER NAVOI'S MUNSHAOT: AUTHORIAL VOICE, EPISTOLARY GENRE, AND SOCIAL POSITIONING

This article investigates register stratification – that is, the systematic differentiation of communicative registers – in Alisher Navoi's epistolary collection Munshaot. The primary objective of the study is to identify and classify the speech registers that Navoi constructs across the letters of the collection in accordance with three governing variables: the social standing of the addressee, the nature of the author-addressee relationship, and the generic conventions of the epistolary subtype concerned. The corpus for comparative analysis comprises letters belonging to the xabariya (informative), javobiya (responsive), and xitobiya (appellative) generic subtypes. The research traces the textual instantiation of the authorial voice through the recurring 'faqir' (the humble self) persona, and examines the divergence between formal-official and intimate-personal registers. Particular attention is devoted to the functional role of religious-mystical (Sufi) lexicon in the articulation of register distinctions. The findings demonstrate that register stratification in Munshaot is systematically governed by the addressee's social position, the communicative purpose of the letter, and genre-specific conventions – thereby reaffirming Navoi's exceptional command of Persianate-Turkic prose rhetoric. The study employs philological analysis, comparative-typological, and stylistic methods.