This article presents a contrastive analysis of the formation and development of collocation theory in English and Uzbek. The study examines collocations from the perspective of habitual co-occurrence in discourse, combinatorial potential, and semantic-functional constraints of lexical units. Major theoretical approaches established in English linguistics-namely the Firthian tradition, systemic functional linguistics, the phraseological school, corpus linguistics, and functional-cognitive frameworks are critically reviewed in order to identify their explanatory potential and limitations with regard to collocational phenomena in Uzbek. The analysis integrates theoretical discussion, corpus-informed observations, and contrastive methodology to demonstrate that full collocational equivalence between English and Uzbek is relatively rare, while partial equivalence constitutes the dominant pattern. The findings further show that collocational mismatches are not random, but represent systematic phenomena shaped by each language’s internal structure, cognitive modeling, and discourse-specific requirements. On this basis, the study argues for the necessity of contrastive collocational analysis in translation studies and bilingual lexicography. The results of the article provide both theoretical and practical foundations for the comparative study of English and Uzbek collocations, for ensuring collocational adequacy in translation, and for the development of bilingual collocational dictionaries.

Collocation, contrastive linguistics, lexical co-occurrence

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