Intercultural Specificity of Implicit Meaning in English and Uzbek Media Discourse
Keywords:
implicit meaning, conversational implicature, presupposition, intercultural pragmatics, media discourse, critical discourse analysis, cultural scripts, English, Uzbek, omparative linguisticsAbstract
Media discourse routinely conveys evaluative and ideological content through implicature, presupposition and indirect speech acts rather than through direct assertion, and the pragmatic devices used for this purpose are not culturally uniform. This article develops and illustrates an integrated pragmatic-discourse framework for comparing the culturally specific realization of implicit meaning in English- and Uzbek-language media discourse, an intercultural pairing that has so far received almost no attention in the internationally indexed pragmatics and discourse-studies literature. The framework combines Gricean and neo-Gricean implicature analysis, presupposition theory, speech-act theory and appraisal-based evaluation, interpreted through Wierzbicka's cultural-scripts approach to avoid imposing Anglophone pragmatic norms on Uzbek material. The framework is applied qualitatively to a purposively selected, same-event bilingual case (Uzbek presidential address coverage) and triangulated with findings reported in three recent, small-scale regional studies of English-Uzbek media pragmatics. The analysis suggests that Uzbek institutional and news discourse relies comparatively more on presupposition and collectivist, context-dependent implicature to perform evaluative and directive work that English-language media discourse tends to perform through more explicit evaluative lexis and modal marking. These findings are offered as a hypothesis for corpus-scale testing rather than as an established generalization. The article closes by outlining the theoretical, practical and methodological implications of the proposed framework and by specifying the corpus-based research required to move from illustrative case analysis to a fully indexed, empirically robust comparative account.
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