A COMPARATIVE-TYPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF THE PLURAL CATEGORY IN ARABIC AND UZBEK

Abstract

This article offers a comparative typological analysis of the plural category in Arabic and Uzbek, integrating morphological, syntactic, and semantic parameters within a single descriptive framework. The study aims to identify the formal markers of plurality, clarify the relationship between grammatical number and quantitative meaning, and explain how secondary semantic components such as collectivity, distributivity, and summativity are encoded in both languages. Methodologically, the research combines functional typology, morphemic segmentation, corpus-informed comparison, and distributional analysis. The empirical basis is a small observational parallel corpus of 1,200 sentences compiled from contemporary Standard Arabic and Modern Literary Uzbek texts, from which 980 nominal units with plural relevance were extracted and coded. The scientific novelty lies in applying the same diagnostic tests to separate “countable plurality” from “grammatical plurality” across the two languages, and in formalizing the points where semantic distinctions are neutralized between Arabic broken plurals and the Uzbek plural suffix -lar. The findings have practical relevance for descriptive grammar writing, translation practice, and language teaching, especially in handling non-isomorphic plural patterns.