SUBJECTIVITY AND POSITIONING STRATEGIES IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK DISCOURSE: A CONTRASTIVE PRAGMATIC STUDY

Abstract

This article investigates the linguistic-pragmatic nature of subjectivity and the positioning strategies through which speakers of English and Uzbek encode stance, evaluation, and epistemic commitment in discourse. Grounded in the theoretical traditions of subjectification (Traugott, 1989; Langacker, 1990) and stance/positioning theory (Du Bois, 2007; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999), the study examines how typologically distinct languages — English, an analytic Indo-European language, and Uzbek, an agglutinative Turkic language — grammaticalize and lexicalize subjective meaning. A corpus of 600 authentic discourse fragments (300 English, 300 Uzbek) drawn from media commentary, academic writing, and spoken interaction was analyzed using a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative pragmatic analysis and quantitative frequency distribution. The findings reveal that while both languages employ comparable functional categories of subjectivity — epistemic, evaluative, and affective — they differ systematically in the formal means of their realization: English relies predominantly on modal auxiliaries, stance adverbials, and parenthetical constructions, whereas Uzbek encodes subjectivity primarily through evidential and modal morphology attached to the verb complex, alongside discourse particles. The study further identifies four recurrent positioning strategies — hedging, boosting, evidential distancing, and affective alignment — whose frequency and combinatorial patterns differ across the two languages in ways that correlate with their typological profiles. The results contribute to contrastive pragmatics and typology by demonstrating that subjectivity, though a functional universal, is typologically constrained in its formal expression, and they offer practical implications for translation, cross-cultural communication, and language pedagogy.