Монголоведение (Dec 2020)
Expanded Modal Vocabulary of Spoken Buryat Revisited: Functional-Modal Words
Abstract
Introduction. Modality is present in any language at the level of words, phrases, sentences. In this regard, it is not unexpected, that the means of its expression can be observed at most different levels of the language: modality is expressed at the syntactic, morphological, lexical, phonetic levels; very often morphological, syntactic and other means are combined. And, nevertheless, despite the obvious prevalence and universality of this phenomenon, the problem of modality has not yet received its full description, and the literature on modality, functional-modal words in particular, is very limited. Goals. The article raises the question of lexical units — nouns, adjectives, adverbs, which in some conditions perform the functions of modal words due to their tendency to develop secondary uses, in particular, the function of modal words, that reinforce, emphasize a certain segment of a statement. Results. Functionalmodal words, having different formal-morphological features and their primary lexical meanings, due to the emotional-expressive connotation inherent in their semantics, can in the message, along with modal words, express their general grammatical meaning - the speaker’s (multi-aspect) attitude to the content your statement or part of it. The considered functionalmodal words do not differ from their ‘brothers’ in the lexical and grammatical category, but episodic losses of lexical meaning in connection with the performance of the function of the modal word draw attention to them as a phenomenon, that signifies the possible beginning of obscuring the lexical meaning and subsequent derivational processes — lexicalization, transposition, transition from one part of speech to another. The paper also touches upon the fundamental theoretical issue of including / excluding emotional-expressive meanings in the modality category, which many researchers exclude from the named category, explaining that they do not express the logical-rational qualification of the content of the utterance. The linguistic material, as it seems to the author, resists the division of statements into logicalrational and emotional-expressive, since in many cases, even within the framework of one word, these two aspects appear in an inseparable unity.
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