THE MIRCOWORLD OF THE LOGICAL AND MODAL PARTICLES. OUTLINES TO LINGUISTIC “PORTRAIT” OF DAZHE

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, V. Gast and many 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 under investigated. Our article is devoted to the functioning of the particle dazhe [даже “even”] in the affirmative and negative contexts. As an example of research language material, we constructed several sentences representing the basic syntactic structures of the analyzed utterances, and many examples from the main corpus 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, including those arising under the influence of negation. Moreover, we dispute the opinion of I.M. Boguslavsky on the need to remove the scalar implicature from the interpretation of that 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 affirmative utterances and negative utterances utterances with negation as a result of interaction of the semantics of the particle and negation; 2) the analysis of dazhe’s functioning in the gradational constructions; 3) the comparative analysis of its functioning in the contexts of neutral and contrastive negation that enables to reveal the specifics of the double scalar implicature and that of unexpectedness, which are the components of the semantic and pragmatic structure of the particle in question.