Communicative Functions of Irony in English and Uzbek

This article investigates the communicative functions of irony in English and Uzbek from a contrastive-pragmatic perspective. Irony is approached as a complex pragmatic phenomenon arising from the incongruity between the literal content of an utterance and the speaker’s intended communicative meaning, with contextual interpretation and implicit evaluation playing a central role. The study aims to identify the principal communicative functions of irony, describe their realization in English and Uzbek, and establish their shared and language-specific features. The research draws on contrastive, contextual, linguopragmatic, and semantic-pragmatic methods. Based on theoretical sources and constructed illustrative examples, the article examines the critical-evaluative, humorous, emotional-expressive, indirect-communicative, social-regulatory, and interpersonal-management functions of irony. The analysis suggests that irony is not limited to conveying a meaning opposite to the literal content of an utterance.