THE ROLE OF VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL COMPONENTS OF ADVERTISING IN ENGLISH AND UZBEK LANGUAGES: A COMPARATIVE MULTIMODAL STUDY

Advertising meaning is rarely produced by language alone. Instead, persuasive impact emerges from the coordinated design of verbal resources (lexis, syntax, slogan rhetoric, metaphor, stance) and non-verbal resources (image, color, layout, typography, gesture, and other visual cues). This article investigates how these components share persuasive labor in English-language and Uzbek-language advertising, and how culture-sensitive values shape multimodal choices. Using a qualitative-dominant multimodal discourse-analytic design grounded in social semiotics and systemic functional linguistics, a small comparative corpus of contemporary static advertising creatives was compiled across three sectors (food and FMCG; services including telecom/finance; and public-interest campaigns). Items were coded for speech acts, evaluative lexis, rhetorical devices, and code-mixing on the verbal layer, and for salience, composition, color meaning, typography/script choice, and representational patterns on the non-verbal layer. Findings suggest that English ads frequently foreground brand voice through compressed imperatives, wordplay, and metaphorical abstraction, relying on visuals to set mood and lifestyle indexicality. Uzbek ads more often allocate persuasive weight to trust-building claims and relational framing, while non-verbal design draws on culturally resonant authenticity cues such as family scenes, hospitality scripts, and locally recognizable aesthetics. In both contexts, meaning is optimized when verbal anchoring reduces ambiguity and non-verbal salience drives attention and affect. The study concludes with implications for translation, localization, and culturally responsible multimodal persuasion.