Pragmatic Characteristics of the Command Speech Act in Parent–Child Communication in English and Uzbek

This article presents a contrastive pragmalinguistic analysis of directive speech acts in English and Uzbek parent-child discourse. As an illocutionary act type encompassing commands, requests, instructions, prohibitions, and warnings, the directive occupies a central position in family interaction: it is through directives that parents regulate children’s behavior and transmit intergenerational normative expectations. Linguistically, each language encodes directives through distinct grammatical means, while pragmatically the same communicative intent is realized differently across contexts, shaped by culturally specific norms of interaction and authority.
Drawing on J.Austin’s speech act theory and J.Searle’s illocutionary taxonomy, the study examines 120 directive utterances (60 per language) using qualitative discourse analysis, pragmatic text analysis, and communicative intent analysis. Four analytical dimensions are addressed: the morphosyntactic patterns of direct imperatives, mitigation strategies, indirect speech acts, and emotionally-marked directiveexpressive hybrids. The combined application of these three mutually complementary analytical methods makes it possible to examine the intricate relationship between the linguistic form of a directive speech act, its contextual meaning, and the speaker’s communicative intention from multiple angles.
Findings reveal that direct imperatives are significantly more frequent in Uzbek than in English parent-child discourse (63.3% vs. 40%), reflecting the cultural legitimation of hierarchical parental authority in Uzbek family culture. Mitigation in English is achieved primarily through lexical and syntactic means (“please”, modal verbs, interrogative reframing), whereas Uzbek relies on morphological modulation (suffixes -chi, -gin, -ing, -aylik). Indirect directives are more prevalent in English (28.3%) than in Uzbek (13.3%), consistent with AngloAmerican negative politeness orientation. The presence of expressive-directive hybrid utterances in both languages demonstrates cross-cultural universality in the pragmatic organization of parental authority discourse, while grammatical and cultural differences are shaped by typological and socio-cultural factors.