Syntactic-Semantic Interface of Nuclear Elements in English, German, and Uzbek

This article investigates the syntactic-semantic interface of nuclear elements — specifically verb predicates and their essential arguments — in three typologically distinct languages: English, German, and Uzbek. By applying principles from generative grammar, Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), and Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), the study compares how these languages encode the core components of a clause through syntax and morphology. English, with its rigid word order and limited morphology, relies on positional cues; German balances flexible word order with case-marking; and Uzbek, as an agglutinative SOV language, encodes argument roles predominantly via morphology and verbal agreement, allowing pro-drop constructions. The analysis highlights how each language maintains the integrity of the core clause structure and assigns semantic roles, despite differing surface strategies. These findings reinforce the universal role of nuclear elements in clause architecture while revealing language-specific mechanisms of their realization at the syntax-semantics interface.