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Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles: New perspectives
Edited by Chiara Fedriani and Andrea Sansó
[Studies in Language Companion Series 186] 2017
► pp. 369–397

Chapter 13
On the pragmatic expansion of Polish gdzieś tam ‘somewhere (there)/about’

| University of Zielona Góra

In standard usage gdzieś tam functions as an adverbial adding approximation/indeterminacy to expressions of place, time and number/amount/measure, and as such it is semantically equivalent to English ‘somewhere (there) in some contexts and ‘about’ in others. In conversational speech, however, its use sometimes diverges, more or less markedly, from the standard one, which is manifested both formally and functionally. The present study sets out to examine, locally, the lexico-syntactic cotext of gdzieś tam (to see how it differs depending on whether the expression is used conventionally or otherwise) and, globally, novel, context-sensitive functions that the phrase is capable of performing in a communicative act. A broader issue the paper attempts to address is the extent, if any, to which the canonical meaning of gdzieś tam is reflected in the pragmatically expanded use of the expression.

Keywords: discourse markers, hedges/hedging, (non-)canonical use of language, (non-)propositional meaning
Article outline
  • 1.Preliminaries
  • 2.Dictionary treatment of gdzieś and tam
  • 3.Hedges and hedging
  • 4.Materials and methods
  • 5.Analysis and discussion
    • 5.1Problematic dichotomy between canonical and non-canonical gdzieś tam
    • 5.2Lexico-grammatical context of gdzieś tam
      • 5.2.1Syntactic scope
      • 5.2.2Lexical co-occurrences
    • 5.3Functions of non-canonical gdzieś tam
      • I.Hedging functions
        • a. Gdzieś tam as a vagueness marker
        • b. Gdzieś tam as a mitigator of illocutionary force
        • c. Gdzieś tam as a mitigator of stylistic anomaly
      • II.Non-hedging function – gdzieś tam as a marker of concept framing
  • 6.Concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 13 November 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.186.14ada
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