SPEECH ACTS ACROSS ENGLISH AND UZBEK DISCOURSES

Abstract

Building on the theoretical framework of speech act theory and 
its application to everyday discourse, this second part of the study turns to the more 
institutionally constrained discourse types in which English–Uzbek intercultural 
communication frequently occurs: academic writing, institutional exchange and 
media discourse. It examines how hedging, formalized requests, mitigated criticism 
and depersonalized refusals characterize academic and institutional communication, 
and how directives, commissives and hybrid declarations shape media and digital 
discourse. The paper then identifies the recurrent categories of communicative error 
excessive formality, misinterpretation of indirectness, misconstrued refusals, 
awkward responses to gratitude and misunderstood phatic conventions - that arise 
when English and Uzbek speakers import the pragmatic conventions of their first 
language into the other’s communicative environment. The findings indicate that 
intercultural communicative failure typically originates not in a deficit of vocabulary 
or grammar but in unconscious pragmatic transfer, and the paper concludes with 
implications for the teaching of intercultural pragmatic competence.