Keywords
Abstract
This article presents a corpus-based lingvopragmatic study of speech acts, politeness strategies, and discourse organization in English and Uzbek weekly astrological prediction (horoscope) texts, a persuasive discourse genre that remains comparatively under-researched in contrastive pragmatics. Drawing on Austin’s and Searle’s Speech Act Theory, Brown and Levinson’s and Leech’s politeness frameworks, and Grice’s Cooperative Principle, the study analyses a purpose-built weekly-horoscope corpus (144 English texts, ≈ 15,600 words; 157 Uzbek texts, ≈ 4,870 words). The analysis shows that Uzbek marks the directive (advice) speech act explicitly and almost universally, through a lexicalized “Maslahat:” (“Advice:”) segment in 98.7% of texts (155 of 157), whereas English distributes directive force implicitly across the narrative, primarily through bare imperatives (≈73 imperative clauses across the corpus, ≈0.5 per text). Both languages reproduce the Barnum effect and observe Grice’s maxim of quality while systematically flouting the maxims of quantity and relation. Discourse-organizational analysis further shows that English weekly texts are structured day-by-day (temporal markers at 47.8 per 1,000 words) while Uzbek texts condense the week into one or two blocks (13.8 per 1,000 words), a difference in register confirmed by sentence-length, word-length, and lexical-diversity indicators. These findings partially confirm a speech-act hypothesis and fully confirm a genre-organization hypothesis, and carry implications for translation studies and media-literacy education.
References
1. Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Clarendon Press.
2. Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and writing. Cambridge University Press.
3. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language usage. Cambridge University Press.
4. Forer, B. R. (1949). The fallacy of personal validation: A classroom demonstration of gullibility. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44(1), 118–123.
5. Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and semantics, Vol. 3: Speech acts (pp. 41–58). Academic Press.
6. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
7. Leech, G. N. (1983). Principles of pragmatics. Longman.
8. Meehl, P. E. (1956). Wanted – A good cookbook. American Psychologist, 11(6), 262–272.
9. Oakes, M. P. (1998). Statistics for corpus linguistics. Edinburgh University Press.
10. Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University Press.
11. Searle, J. R. (1976). A classification of illocutionary acts. Language in Society, 5(1), 1–23.
12. Swales, J. M. (1990). Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings. Cambridge University Press.