Core-Dominant-Peripheral Organization of Perception Lexemes in English and Uzbek: A Symmetry-Asymmetry Model

Abstract

This article proposes a core-dominant-peripheral model for the comparative analysis of perception lexemes in English and Uzbek. The study covers five sensory domains: vision, taste, smell, hearing, and touch. Its material consists of explanatory dictionary entries and examples from literary and publicistic texts examined through comparative, componential, semantic-field, conceptual-modeling, and statistical methods. Symmetry is understood as the preservation of an invariant perceptual meaning across the two languages, whereas asymmetry arises from differences in lexical granularity, evaluation, duration, intentionality, stylistic coloring, and contextual extension. The neutral pairs see/ko‘rmoq, look/qaramoq, hear/eshitmoq, listen/tinglamoq, touch/tegmoq, smell/hid, and taste/ta’m occupy the central zones of their fields. More specific verbs and evaluative nouns or adjectives move toward the periphery and display stronger asymmetry. Quantitative results confirm that lexical field size and the proportion of symmetric units vary by sensory modality, while the overall organization remains systematically comparable.