The Particle Ba In Contemporary Serbian
Abstract
Abstract
The paper is a relevance-theoretic account of the meaning of the Serbian particle ba, once a content word, now a pragmatic particle restricted to informal discourse. It is argued that the emphatic and specificatory senses of ba can be subsumed under a single description of the particle as a marker of non-loose use. The argumentation is based on the relevance-theoretic distinction between description and interpretation in language use and on the notion of loose talk. The main issue of how the particle contributes to the relevance of its host-utterance is anchored in a tripartite distinction: Conceptual/procedural, truth-functional/non-truthfunctional, explicature/implicature. It is claimed that the particle ba is a procedural, non-truth-functional linguistic item that contributes to relevance by constraining the explicit content of the host-utterance.
Keywords: Serbian particle, Relevance theory, Loose talk, Literality, Pragmatic meaning.
The paper is a relevance-theoretic account of the meaning of the Serbian particle ba, once a content word, now a pragmatic particle restricted to informal discourse. It is argued that the emphatic and specificatory senses of ba can be subsumed under a single description of the particle as a marker of non-loose use. The argumentation is based on the relevance-theoretic distinction between description and interpretation in language use and on the notion of loose talk. The main issue of how the particle contributes to the relevance of its host-utterance is anchored in a tripartite distinction: Conceptual/procedural, truth-functional/non-truthfunctional, explicature/implicature. It is claimed that the particle ba is a procedural, non-truth-functional linguistic item that contributes to relevance by constraining the explicit content of the host-utterance.
Keywords: Serbian particle, Relevance theory, Loose talk, Literality, Pragmatic meaning.