THEORETICAL APPROACHES TO THE EXPRESSION OF RESPECT IN UZBEK AND ENGLISH
Keywords:
respect, politeness, Uzbek, English, pragmatics, honorifics, speech acts, intercultural communication.Abstract
Respect is one of the most socially sensitive meanings encoded in language, because it connects grammatical choice with hierarchy, interpersonal distance, cultural expectation and pragmatic competence. This thesis examines theoretical approaches to the expression of respect in Uzbek and English and identifies the major linguistic mechanisms by which respectful meaning is produced in the two languages. The analysis shows that Uzbek tends to mark respect through the opposition of sen and siz, deferential address forms, kinship-based appellatives, honorific pluralization and culturally fixed formulas of etiquette. English, by contrast, relies more strongly on indirectness, modal verbs, hedging, titles, apologies and conventional politeness routines. Drawing on pragmatics, politeness theory, speech act theory, sociolinguistics and translation studies, the study argues that respect is not a purely lexical or grammatical category, but a complex communicative phenomenon shaped by social roles, speaker intention, cultural values and the addressee’s interpretation. The comparison demonstrates that Uzbek and English share universal principles of face-saving and interpersonal harmony, while differing substantially in the linguistic resources used to realize them.
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