A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTIONS OF IRONY IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK

This article examines the communicative functions of irony in English and Uzbek from a contrastive-pragmatic perspective. Irony is treated not as a mechanical reversal of literal meaning but as a context-sensitive communicative practice through which speakers criticize, ridicule, tease, establish solidarity, mitigate disagreement, express scepticism, or expose social contradictions. The analysis combines pragmatic theory with a qualitative reading of selected literary episodes from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Abdulla Qahhor’s short story O‘g‘ri (“The Thief”). The selected episodes are illustrative textual cases rather than a representative or statistically balanced corpus. The analysis shows that the communicative function of irony cannot be inferred from lexical form alone: the triggering event, speaker–hearer relationship, target of evaluation, and narrative framing are crucial. A functional matrix is proposed to distinguish context, target, evaluative stance, interactional aim, linguistic realization, and evidence for interpretation. The framework can support further corpus research, stylistic analysis, and translation studies involving English and Uzbek.