Cognitive-Pragmatic Mechanisms of Negative Emotion Framing in English and Uzbek Media Discourse

Abstract

This article investigates negative-emotion framing in selected English and Uzbek television interviews, podcasts and social-media utterances documented in Bakhramova’s dissertation. A qualitative contrastive analysis examines mitigation, intensification, figurative conceptualization and pragmatic reframing. English examples from Jimmy Fallon and Dr. Phil include “kind of”, “I guess” and parallel negative self-evaluations; Uzbek examples from Yor-yor and Ayol qalbi illustrate comparative attenuation, culturally situated consolation and embodied metaphors. The results suggest that both languages employ overlapping pragmatic resources, whose effects depend on local interaction and genre. The article proposes a five-stage model linking emotional situation, conceptualization, linguistic verbalization, pragmatic modification and discursive outcome. This purposive sample does not support population-level claims or statistical estimates.