A SOCIO-COGNITIVE-PRAGMATIC ANALYSIS OF POLITENESS AND ADDRESS FORMS IN THE SPEECH OF A DIALECTAL LINGUISTIC PERSONALITY: EVIDENCE FROM SAMARKAND UZBEK

Abstract

This study examines the socio-cognitive and pragmatic organization of politeness and address forms in the speech of dialectal linguistic personalities in the Samarkand Region of Uzbekistan. The empirical basis is field material collected from 112 native speakers in Samarkand city and several districts of the region between 2024 and 2026 through participant observation and spontaneous everyday interaction. The analysis is explicitly qualitative and does not make population-level frequency claims. The analysis integrates Karaulov’s three-level model of linguistic personality with pragmatic approaches to speech action, face, relational work, and culturally situated politeness. Three recurrent tendencies are identified. First, phonetic and formulaic reduction, including forms such as Somalaykum and Sobo‘, functions as an interactionally meaningful resource in familiar and informal settings, although reduction is treated as an association rather than a deterministic marker of social closeness. Second, politeness resources can be organized provisionally as a core-periphery field in which broadly shared etiquette formulae coexist with regionally salient forms such as aylansin, aylanay, and qoqindiq. Third, self-lowering expressions such as kamina and faqir contribute to relational positioning by elevating the addressee and indexing conventional social deference in culturally marked situations. The findings show that dialectal politeness is best understood as context-sensitive relational practice rather than as a fixed inventory of etiquette formulae. The study contributes qualitative evidence to Uzbek dialectology, pragmalinguistics, and research on linguistic personality while also identifying the need for future corpus-based work with fuller demographic metadata, verbatim interactional transcripts, and quantitative distributional analysis.