Modal particles and their functional equivalents: a speech-act-theoretic approach

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• 作者：Waltereit ; Richard
• 关键词：Modal particles ; Discourse particles ; Speech acts ; Romance languages ; Semantic change ; Delocutivity
• 刊名：Journal of Pragmatics
• 出版年：2001
• 出版时间：September, 2001
• 年：2001
• 卷：33
• 期：9
• 页码：1391-1417
• 全文大小：2.16 M

文摘

Modal particles are abundant in German, but rather rare in many other languages, e.g., Romance languages. While it is evident that some have more modal particles than others, it seems difficult to conceive of the function of modal particles as being restricted to particular languages. The intuition underlying this article is that if, e.g., the Romance languages have fewer modal particles than German, they should have other means of expressing the same function. It is claimed that this function essentially consists in accommodating the speech act at minimal linguistic expense to the speech situation. ‘At minimal expense’ means that accommodation is not done explicitly; rather, it is achieved by evoking a different speech situation that typically would fit that speech act. This is studied for the French particle quand même, the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese diminutive, and the ‘backchecking’ imperfect occurring in various languages, as in What was your name? or Who got the wine? Besides the minimality of linguistic expression of a pragmatic function, these forms share certain properties in their diachronic genesis: they arise through metonymic semantic change from their non-modal counterparts, the relevant metonymy taking as its conceptual basis a contiguity between a sound chain and speech situation.