ENANTIOSEMY IDENTIFICATION CRITERIA: AN OPERATIONAL FRAMEWORK BASED ON ENGLISH AND UZBEK DATA

Enantiosemy, the coexistence of opposed meanings within a single linguistic form, presents a persistent classification problem in lexical semantics because apparent opposition may arise from polysemy, homonymy, pragmatic inference, or discourse-specific reinterpretation. This study develops an operational framework for identifying enantiosemy through a qualitative comparison of English and Uzbek data. A controlled set of 24 candidate units, evenly divided between the two languages, was evaluated using six diagnostics: semantic polarity, single-unit identity, contextual disambiguation, collocational differentiation, translation sensitivity, and functional classification. The analysis classified 12 candidates as robust, six as borderline, and six as non-enantiosemic. English examples were concentrated primarily at the lexical level, whereas Uzbek candidates more frequently involved grammatical and phraseological mechanisms. The findings indicate that semantic opposition alone is insufficient for classification: robust cases require evidence that opposed senses belong to one linguistic unit and are systematically activated by distinguishable contexts. The proposed framework therefore integrates structural, cognitive, pragmatic, and cross-linguistic evidence. It also provides a transparent basis for separating genuine enantiosemy from ordinary polysemy, homonymy, and context-induced contrast. Although the dataset is limited, the model offers a replicable foundation for future corpus-based research, lexicography, translation studies, and contrastive semantic analysis across typologically different languages, and pedagogy.

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