This article examines irony as a semantic and pragmatic mechanism in the prose of Nadezhda Teffi and Salomat Vafo. The study proceeds from the assumption that irony should be analyzed not only as a stylistic trope, but also as a mode of semantic tension arising from the interaction of conceptual, structural, pragmatic, and denotative aspects of lexical meaning. The comparison of Teffi’s short prose with Salomat Vafo’s psychologically intensive Uzbek prose shows that irony in the two corpora is realized through different configurations of semantic conflict. In Teffi, irony often emerges from the disproportion between elevated lexical forms and trivial everyday reality. In Salomat Vafo, by contrast, irony tends to arise from the discrepancy between literal utterance, emotional restraint, and implicit judgment. Special attention is paid to the stories Elat and Arg‘imchoq, where portrait, landscape, silence, and socially ritualized speech deepen the latent ironic effect. The article argues that the semantic trapezium provides a productive model for understanding irony as a multidimensional relation between sign, concept, denotation, and contextual interpretation.

Irony, lexical meaning, semantic trapezium

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