DERIVATIONAL ANALYSIS OF FOLK MEDICINE LEXICAL UNITS IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK: IMPLICATIONS FOR PHYTOMEDICINE TERMINOLOGY AND CROSS-CULTURAL UNDERSTANDING OF MEDICINAL PLANT KNOWLEDGE

Abstract

This study investigates the derivational morphology of folk medicine lexical units in English and Uzbek, with a focus on medicinal plant terminology. The primary aim is to identify shared and divergent derivational patterns that reflect cultural transmission of ethnobotanical and phytomedicinal knowledge across these two linguistically distant languages. A corpus of 420 folk medicine lexical units was compiled from ethno-botanical sources, traditional medical manuscripts, and contemporary pharmacognosy literature in both languages. Derivational analysis was conducted using synchronic and diachronic approaches, examining prefixation, suffixation, compounding, and conversion. Semantic clustering was performed to group terms by medicinal plant parts (root, leaf, bark, flower), preparation methods (decoction, infusion, maceration), and therapeutic action (anti-inflammatory, analgesic, carminative). Analysis revealed that English folk medicine terminology relies heavily on Greco-Latin derivational bases (72.3%), while Uzbek terminology demonstrates predominant Arabic-Persian borrowing patterns (64.8%), with a growing stratum of Russian-mediated internationalism. Compounding is the dominant word-formation strategy in Uzbek (41%), whereas suffixation prevails in English (38%). Both languages exhibit productive derivational patterns for plant-part terminology and therapeutic categories. Cross-linguistic comparison identified 87 conceptually equivalent term pairs with structurally divergent derivational pathways, suggesting independent parallel development of phytomedicinal lexica. The derivational systems encoding folk medicine knowledge in English and Uzbek are structurally distinct yet functionally convergent. Understanding these patterns is essential for accurate translation of phytomedicine texts, standardization of traditional medicine terminology, and development of bilingual resources for practitioners. Findings have direct implications for the globalization of herbal medicine knowledge and cross-cultural pharmacognostic research