LEXICO-PRAGMATIC MODELS OF WORDPLAY IN UZBEK AND ENGLISH: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF COMMUNICATIVE REALIZATION

This study investigates the lexico-pragmatic models of wordplay in Uzbek and English languages, focusing on their communicative realization in different discourse types. Wordplay is considered not merely a stylistic device but a complex pragmatic phenomenon involving linguistic triggers, contextual activation, cognitive interpretation, and inferential meaning construction. The research applies a comparative approach to analyze how wordplay operates in English and Uzbek based on phonological, lexical, and phraseological mechanisms. The findings reveal that while English wordplay predominantly relies on homonymy, polysemy, and phonological ambiguity, Uzbek wordplay is more strongly influenced by phraseological transformation and culturally embedded semantic shifts. The study also proposes a unified lexico-pragmatic model that explains the cognitive and communicative stages of wordplay interpretation. The results contribute to pragmatics, cognitive linguistics, and comparative linguistics by offering a systematic framework for analyzing wordplay across typologically different languages.