This study compares the pragmatic purposes (maqsad) of joy-expressing emotive units in English and Uzbek. Drawing on the theory of emotivity (Shakhovsky, 2008), the functional semantics of evaluation (Wolf, 1985), speech-act theory (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1976), and the ethnosociopragmatic model of Safarov and Toirova (2007), it analyses joy-emotives in Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook and Said Ahmad's Qirq besh kun. In both languages such units fuse two purposes: the illocutionary expression of the speaker's own positive state and the perlocutionary effort to affect the hearer and build rapport. The languages differ in their means: English encodes joy lexically, through manner adverbs, affect adjectives, verbs of enjoyment, and idioms in the reporting frame, whereas Uzbek encodes it morphologically and ritually, through the diminutive -gina, vocative endearments, and gratitude formulae. The contrast is interpreted as linguocultural.