PUNS AND WORDPLAY AS CULTURE-BOUND HUMOR DEVICES: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND UZBEK LANGUAGES

This study examines puns and wordplay as culture-bound humor devices through a contrastive analysis of English and Uzbek. Drawing on the General Theory of Verbal Humor, Relevance Theory, and cross-cultural pragmatics, the research analyzes a corpus of 60 instances of wordplay (30 English, 30 Uzbek) collected from literary texts, folk humor, media discourse, and everyday communication. The findings reveal that English wordplay relies predominantly on homophony (47% of the English sample) and polysemy (30%), exploiting the language’s extensive inventory of sound-alike words and its analytic morphological structure. Uzbek wordplay draws primarily on agglutinative morphological manipulation (40% of the Uzbek sample) and phraseological transformation (30%), reflecting both Turkic typological features and collectivist cultural traditions such as askiya verbal dueling and the Nasreddin Afandi narrative cycle. The study demonstrates that puns are culturally embedded communicative acts whose production and interpretation depend on language-specific structural resources and culturally shared knowledge.