LITERARY DISCOURSE AND THE COMMUNICATIVE FOUNDATIONS OF CONNOTATION IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK TEXTS

Abstract

This article investigates the notion of literary discourse and the communicative-pragmatic foundations of connotation in English and Uzbek literary texts. Distinguishing text from discourse along eight parameters, it draws on Harris, van Dijk, Ricoeur, Bakhtin, Barthes, Todorov, Lotman and Foucault among foreign scholars and on Safarov and Mahmudov among Uzbek scholars to argue that literary discourse is not merely a sequence of sentences but a socio-communicative process in which the author's knowledge, attitude, worldview and intention to influence the reader are encoded. Within this framework connotation is shown to be one of the principal mechanisms by which the literary text exerts its aesthetic and communicative effect.

Building on Jakobson's six-component model of communication and on the encoding–decoding theory of Hall, the study demonstrates that connotative meaning is transmitted only when author and reader share at least a partly common code, and that the decoding of connotative units depends on the reader's cultural and contextual knowledge. The four traditional discourse types narrative, description, exposition and argument are shown to operate not in pure form but in synthesis, with metaphor and connotation functioning as the semantic mechanism that unites them.