Syntactic Mitigation in Sensitive Family Communication: A Comparative Study of English and Uzbek

This article examines syntactic mitigation in sensitive family communication in English and Uzbek. The analysis focuses on interrogative, conditional, modal, impersonal and first-person plural constructions used to reduce the categorical force of requests, advice, criticism and disagreement. The findings show that both languages provide grammatical resources for regulating directness, although these resources differ structurally. English makes productive use of modal interrogatives and tentative constructions, whereas Uzbek frequently combines conditional and modal forms with person distinctions. Syntactic mitigation is therefore interpreted as a pragmatic mechanism for managing interpersonal relations in family communication.