COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF POLITENESS DEVICES IN UZBEK AND ENGLISH

Abstract

Politeness has been among the most extensively researched issues in pragmatics and sociolinguistics because it plays a role in facilitating harmonious human interaction across cultures. This article presents a comparative analytic analysis of politeness devices between Uzbek and English, analyzing lexical, morpho-syntactic, discursive, and pragmatic strategies. The study places its analysis within three long-standing frameworks: Lakoff’s politeness principles, Leech’s Politeness Principle, and Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory, coupling these with more contemporary approaches, including Watts’ discursive framework, Culpeper’s model of impoliteness, and Spencer-Oatey’s rapport management model. Empirical evidence is drawn from corpora, authentic dialogue, and previous research. The findings point both to universal and culture-specific processes: English is found to prefer syntactic and pragmatic devices such as modal verbs, hedges, and indirectness, whereas Uzbek uses politeness in conjunction with pronoun distinction, honorifics, blessings, and formulaically dense displays of a cultural kind. The analysis emphasizes the intercultural relevance of the differences, underscoring the risk of pragmatic failure and miscommunication in cross-linguistic communication. Pedagogical recommendations are proposed for encouraging intercultural competence in English and Uzbek learners