False emptiness: are so-called "parasitical words" really semantically void?
- Autores: Irina Levontina, Alexei Shmelev
- Localización: Meaning-Text Theory 2007 [Recurso electrónico]: proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Meaning-Text Theory : Klagenfurt, May 20 - 24, 2007 / Kim Gerdes (ed. lit.), Tilmann Reuther (ed. lit.), Leo Wanner (ed. lit.), 2007, ISBN 978-3-86688-017-7, págs. 259-268
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Modern semantics gradually masters the increasing quantity of units which earlier were considered semantically "empty" discovering that they have rich and intricate meanings (this is true, in particular, of verbs designating lexical functions, various discourse words, etc.), this trend being an outgrowth of some ideas of the Meaning-Text Theory. The remaining items still often viewed as semantically empty units are those "semi-words" which in terms of speech standards are described as "parasitical words". The emptiness of such items is imaginary. In each particular case, the considered items may be omitted; however, their full absence in a sentence can produce the impression of pragmatic incorrectness, and the full absence in a discourse the impression of foreigner's speech. Semantics and functions of items in question are manifold, and each item has some interesting idiosyncratic features. They have a lot of language-specific features and deserve linguistic description no less than other linguistic units.
