MORPHOLOGICAL FEATURES OF THE PHENOMENON OF PREFIXATION IN LOANWORDS OF THE UZBEK LANGUAGE

The article describes the morphological features of prefixation in the loanword stratum of modern Uzbek. All prefixal elements of the language are of foreign origin, and they entered together with the Arabic, Persian and Russian lexical layers. The study establishes five structural criteria of prefixal status for a suffixing language, applies them to the whole inventory, and shows that the elements of that inventory occupy different degrees of morphological integration. Three types of evidence are used. The first is the behaviour of the prefixed complex under inflection and further derivation, where forms such as noaniqlik, hamkorlashmoq and g'ayriqonuniylik prove that the complex functions as a single stem. The second is combinability with native Turkic stems, which distinguishes a prefix of Uzbek from a foreign element carried in by a ready-made loanword. The third is morphonological behaviour at the boundary, where the absence of harmony and of assimilation and the tolerance of vowel sequences of the type noaniq mark the prefix boundary as stronger than any suffix boundary of the language. The article also examines the competition between prefixation and the native suffixes -siz, -li and -dosh, which produces doublets such as besuv and suvsiz or hamkasb and kasbdosh, and it proposes a scale of analysability for loan stems that begin with a prefix-like syllable.