Pragmatic Features of Word Order in French and Uzbek

This study considers the pragmatic functions of word order in French and Uzbek through a comparative linguistic approach. This study investigates the role of word order in information structure, communicative intention, and theme–rheme alignment in several typologically distinct languages. By comparative and descriptive, qualitative process-oriented methods, we analyze the syntactic patterns, pragmatic strategies, and discourse-level realizations in both languages. The results indicate that syntactically and prosodically encoded pragmatic meaning in French, with its rather fixed SVO word order, compared to Uzbek, with a free SOV structure, is primarily conveyed by means of word order variation. This has relevant consequences for the comparative linguistics, the translation studies, and for the foreign language pedagogy.