THE HISTORICAL AND ETYMOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT OF PREFIXATION IN THE UZBEK LANGUAGE

The article examines the historical and etymological development of prefixation in the Uzbek language. Uzbek belongs to the Turkic family, whose word formation rests almost entirely on suffixation, and therefore every prefixal element of the modern language carries a traceable history of language contact or of internal reanalysis. The study distinguishes five chronological layers: the Old Turkic base, in which productive prefixation is absent; the intensifying reduplicative model of native origin; the Arabic layer that entered after the Islamization of Movarounnahr; the Persian and Tajik layer, which supplied the core of the present prefixal inventory; and the Russian and international layer of the twentieth century, continued after 1991 by elements of English origin. Each prefixal element is described through its source form, its original lexical meaning and the stage at which it became segmentable for Uzbek speakers. The material shows that borrowing alone does not create a prefix. A foreign element acquires prefixal status only when it combines with native Turkic stems and when the resulting complex takes Uzbek inflection as a single unit. On this basis the article proposes a grammaticalization cline for Uzbek prefixal elements that runs from free word through semi-bound component to fully bound prefix, and it shows that the elements of the modern inventory occupy different points on that cline.