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Pragmatic aspects of entrepreneurial discourse and a comparative corpus-based analysis of English and Uzbek

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Muhlisa Shuhratova

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Abstract

This study examines the manifestation of lexical-semantic relations in entrepreneurial discourse, drawing on a purpose-built corpus of 1,250 authentic English-language business texts encompassing investor pitch decks, business plans, startup editorial articles, and executive social media posts. Employing a corpus-based methodology augmented by semantic field analysis and collocational profiling, the research identifies and categorizes five primary types of lexical-semantic relations — synonymy, antonymy, hyponymy, collocational networks, and metaphorical mappings — and investigates how these relations function within the rhetorical and ideological architecture of entrepreneurial communication. The analysis reveals that synonymy and near-synonymous variation constitute the most pervasive structural mechanism, accounting for 38.4% of all identified relational instances, followed by collocational networks at 22.1% and hyponymic structuring at 19.2%. Genre-specific distribution patterns are shown to correlate systematically with the communicative goals of each discourse type, suggesting that lexical-semantic organization is not merely a linguistic feature but a rhetorically motivated strategy deployed to construct credibility, negotiate risk, and legitimize entrepreneurial identity. The findings contribute to the growing interdisciplinary field at the intersection of business linguistics, cognitive semantics, and discourse analysis, and hold applied implications for language pedagogy within business and economics education.

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References

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