Analyzing Cognitive Verbs in English and Uzbek

Abstract

This article explores the verb as the semantic and grammatical core of the sentence and argues that verbal predicates have a broader meaning potential than their basic lexical semantics. Drawing on S.D.Kasnelson’s approach, it is shown that a verbal predicate not only denotes an event or state but also encodes a “sentence blueprint” through its valency structure (i.e., a set of semantic slots to be filled by arguments). The paper notes that modern linguistics lacks a universally accepted semantic classification of verbs; therefore, a paradigmatic perspective is employed, distinguishing verbs of activity, state, property, and relation on the basis of invariant meaning. The main focus is the classification of mental (cognitive) verbs into microfields, including verbs of sensation, desire, perception (general perception, visual perception, auditory perception, olfactory perception), attention, emotional experience and attitude, thinking, and memory. The analysis is supported by Uzbek and English examples drawn from literary sources. The study contributes to the systematization of the mental lexicon and provides implications for contrastive semantics, lexicography, translation, and language teaching