Communicative Functions of Phrasemes in English and Uzbek Political Discourse

This article examines the communicative functions of phrasemes in English and Uzbek political discourse from a comparative perspective. A phraseme is defined as a language unit with a fixed pattern, semantic unity, syntactic indivisibility, compactness and figurative meaning. The communicative function of a phraseme is understood as the type of speech act it performs within an utterance, as distinct from its pragmatic effect on the addressee. Drawing on the functional-semantic classification of A.V. Kunin, the speech-act theory of J. Austin and J. Searle, and the discourse-functional models of E.I. Sheygal and P. Chilton, the article proposes a working typology of five communicative functions of phrasemes and illustrates them with descriptive examples from English and Uzbek political texts. The article concludes with observations on the common and language-specific features of phraseme use in the two political discourses.