WORDPLAY IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK: A CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF MECHANISMS, FUNCTIONS, AND TRANSLATION CHALLENGES

Abstract

This article presents a systematic contrastive linguistic analysis of wordplay in English and Uzbek, two structurally and typologically distinct languages. Drawing on descriptive, comparative, and contextual-interpretive methods, the study investigates the phonological, semantic, morphological, syntactic, pragmatic, and graphological mechanisms through which wordplay is formed in each language, the communicative and stylistic functions it performs, and the translation challenges that arise when wordplay is rendered across the English–Uzbek language pair. The findings reveal that despite belonging to different language families — English to the Indo-European analytic group and Uzbek to the Turkic agglutinative group — both languages share universal mechanisms rooted in semantic ambiguity, phonological creativity, figurative language, and contextual reinterpretation. However, the two languages diverge considerably in the linguistic instruments through which these mechanisms operate: English exploits its homophonic irregularity, lexical polysemy, and orthographic inconsistency, while Uzbek leverages its agglutinative morphology, vowel harmony, oral tradition (including the genre of askiya), and culturally embedded phraseological units. The study further demonstrates that translation of wordplay across this pair is inherently challenging due to structural, phonological, and cultural asymmetries, necessitating strategies of adaptation, compensation, and dynamic equivalence. The research contributes to comparative linguistics, humor studies, translation theory, and cross-cultural communication by illuminating how language structure both enables and constrains linguistic creativity.