CONTEXTUAL SEMANTICS OF PHRASEOLOGICAL UNITS

This article examines the contextual semantics of phraseological units at the intersection of Uzbek linguistics and contemporary phraseological studies. The aim is to determine how the meaning of a phraseological unit is actualized in discourse and how a stable phraseological invariant interacts with context-dependent semantic variants. The study applies descriptive, componential, contextual, functional-pragmatic, and linguocultural methods. The findings show that phraseological meaning cannot be reduced to dictionary glosses alone; it is redistributed through immediate textual environment, communicative situation, stylistic register, authorial intention, and cultural presuppositions. Five major forms of contextual actualization are identified: the distinction between literal and idiomatic meanings, emotional-evaluative intensification or attenuation, pragmatic reorientation, stylistic recentering, and transformational variation. The results are relevant for lexicography, corpus annotation, literary interpretation, and the teaching of phraseology.