Scholarly record

SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC FEATURES OF THE RUSSIAN PARTICLE DAZHE [“EVEN”] IN NEGATION

K.S. Hakobyan, A. S. Hakobyan, O. A. Vygovskaya-Kazarina, A. V. Lobyntseva

Abstract

In recent times, in the context of the contemporary anthropocentric linguistics, when the study of the pragmatic aspect of the language system functioning becomes particularly relevant, many linguists turned to an issue of particles that are the universal explicators of the semantic and pragmatic meanings (refer to works of A. Wierzbicka, T.M. Nikolaeva, I.M. Boguslavskiy and others). Despite very active and rather fruitful studying of particles, that for a long time had remained on the periphery of research interests, a whole set of their categorical features has been underinvestigated. Our article is devoted to the functioning of the Russian particle dazhe [“even”] in the negative contexts. As an example of research language material, we constructed several sentences representing the basic syntactic structures of the analyzed utterances, and hundreds of examples from the main subcorpus of the electronic resource "Russian National Corpus". The main purpose of the article is to study semantic and pragmatic implicatures that are included in the semantics of the particle dazhe, and their modifications under the influence of negation. Moreover, we dispute the opinion of I.M. Boguslavskiy on the need to remove the scalar implicature from the interpretation of this particle, to which he came because of the insufficiently strict separation of the two scales in the double scalar implicature. The methods of conducting the research were 1) the analysis of the semantic and pragmatic presuppositions and implicatures generated by dazhe in the negative expressions as a result of interaction of the semantics of the particle and negation; 2) the comparative analysis of its functioning in the contexts of neutral and contrastive negation that enables to reveal the peculiarities of the double scalar implicature and that of unexpectedness, which are the components of the semantic and pragmatic structure of the particle in question. When we deal with the contrastive negation in constructions with ascending and descending gradation and the implicature of unexpectedness is neutralized, the actualization of the double scalar implicature reveals itself: the vector's direction on the expectations scale remains unchanged, i.e. it may be described as follows: from the most to the least expected and, finally, to the unexpected element, while the vector on the second scale of the integral predicative feature gets an opportunity to change its direction from “the smallest” to “the largest” extent of its actualization and vice versa. The context of contrastive negation also enables to describe one of the important features of the scalar implicature: dazhe indicates the “limit of acceptability” of the main element Q, as well as the fact that the actualization of the element mentioned is potentially possible in the given situation.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgemsocial2018/3.6/S14.069

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