LINGUOCULTURAL AND PRAGMATIC FEATURES OF ENGLISH AND UZBEK CHILDREN’S ANECDOTES

Аннотация

This article examines English and Uzbek children’s anecdotes as short humorous texts that encode culturally specific models of childhood, schooling, family communication, verbal creativity, politeness and social norms. The study adopts a comparative linguocultural and pragmalinguistic approach. It analyzes selected English and Uzbek children’s jokes in terms of semantic opposition, pragmatic function, cultural code, image system and translation potential. The findings show that English children’s anecdotes tend to rely more heavily on verbal play, idioms, polysemy, homophones, spelling-based ambiguity and the “smart kid” stereotype, whereas Uzbek children’s anecdotes more often foreground family, respect, teacher-student relations, moral upbringing, hospitality, food symbolism, national clothing and everyday cultural realia. In both traditions, children are represented not as passive objects of laughter but as active interpreters of adult discourse. However, the English model emphasizes individual wit and verbal creativity, while the Uzbek model emphasizes polite playfulness and culturally regulated cleverness.