EXPRESSIVE INTENSIFICATION OF SUFFIXES IN UZBEK ARGOT

Abstract

Expressive suffixation is a core mechanism by which Uzbek argot amplifies affect, indexes social stance, and encodes subtle pragmatic shades of meaning. Building on recent descriptive and psycholinguistic work, this thesis demonstrates that diminutive, augmentative, and evaluative suffixes—especially -cha, -gina, -gacha, -vachcha, -zor, and -garchilik—undergo systematic semantic “over-clocking” in non-standard registers. Through a corpus of 430 naturally occurring slang tokens and targeted speaker interviews, the analysis shows (i) how intensifying suffixes layer emotional force onto base lexemes, (ii) how allomorphic variation interacts with vowel harmony to heighten iconicity, and (iii) how speakers exploit the agglutinative template to stack multiple expressive morphemes for rhetorical punch. The findings illuminate the dynamic interface between morphology and sociolinguistic identity in contemporary Uzbek.