DIFFERENTIAL DISTRIBUTION OF SUBSTANDARD MENTAL VERBS ACROSS COMMUNICATIVE REGISTERS IN UZBEK AND ENGLISH: A FUNCTIONAL-STYLISTIC AND PRAGMATIC APPROACH

This article examines the differential distribution of substandard mental verbs across communicative registers in English and Uzbek from functional-stylistic and pragmatic perspectives. The study focuses on colloquial, slang, idiomatic, reduced, metaphorically extended, and socially marked verbal expressions associated with thinking, knowing, understanding, remembering, forgetting, guessing, noticing, and attention. It investigates how register variables—mode, tenor, communicative setting, degree of formality, interpersonal distance, and speaker stance—condition the selection and interpretation of such units. A qualitative contrastive design integrates register analysis, componential semantics, contextual-pragmatic interpretation, discourse-functional analysis, and functional equivalence. The findings indicate that substandard mental verbs cluster most densely in informal conversation, peer interaction, digital discourse, entertainment discourse, and stylized fictional dialogue, while their distribution decreases in highly monitored institutional and academic registers. English shows strong productivity of phrasal verbs, stance constructions, and reduced conversational formulas; Uzbek relies extensively on phraseological, somatic, figurative, and colloquially marked verbal constructions. In both languages, register choice affects not only stylistic acceptability but also stance, solidarity, evaluation, mitigation, irony, and identity projection. The article proposes a register-sensitive model of substandard mental verb selection and highlights implications for contrastive pragmatics, translation, lexicography, and language teaching.