Sarcasm, the most pointed form of verbal irony, conveys a critical evaluation opposed to what is literally said, yet the linguistic means by which it is signalled differ markedly across languages. This article offers a contrastive lingucultural and pragmatic analysis of how sarcasm is marked in Uzbek and English. Drawing on a comparable corpus of literary dialogue and informal digital communication, it identifies and compares the formal devices that carry the sarcastic cue. The analysis shows that the two languages exploit different structural levels for the same pragmatic purpose. English, lacking a dedicated sarcasm morpheme, marks sarcasm lexically and prosodically through positive evaluative vocabulary, interjections, conventionalized formulae, and hyperbole or understatement. Uzbek, an agglutinative language, concentrates the cue in bound morphology reportative suffixes, diminutive-affectionate and honorific markers, and attitudinal clitics that re-voices and inverts forms normally expressing warmth or deference. The same echoic, dissociative mechanism thus surfaces through divergent means, shaped jointly by language type and cultural values: each language inverts the very resources it has most elaborated for affiliation. The findings extend irony theory with under-described Uzbek data and refine the typological understanding of how attitude is encoded.

sarcasm; verbal irony; contrastive pragmatics; morphological marking; Uzbek; English; linguoculturology; echoic mention.

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