GREETING AS A SPEECH ACT: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ENGLISH, UZBEK AND RUSSIAN

Abstract

Greeting is one of the most frequent forms of interpersonal communication and a conventional means of initiating, maintaining, or renewing social contact. Although the need to greet is universal, its linguistic forms and pragmatic meanings vary across languages and cultures. This study examines greeting as a speech act in English, Uzbek, and Russian from a comparative pragmatic and linguocultural perspective. Particular attention is paid to conventional, time-based, formal and informal greetings, welcoming expressions, phatic inquiries, and reunion formulas. The study combines Speech Act Theory, politeness theory, speech etiquette, and cross-cultural pragmatics and employs comparative, contextual, pragmatic, and linguocultural methods. The analysis demonstrates that the three languages share the basic function of establishing or renewing interpersonal contact, while differing in the ways formality, respect, familiarity, social distance, and cultural expectations are expressed. The findings show that greeting is not limited to lexical equivalents such as Hello, Salom, and Привет, but constitutes a multifunctional pragmatic field. The study contributes to comparative pragmatic research and has implications for intercultural communication, translation, and foreign-language teaching.