Metaprzymiotnikowe linguistic hedges 'istny', 'prawdziwy', 'swoisty' – kilka uwag o ich statusie semantyczno-składniowym

Abstract

Meta-adjectival Linguistic Hedges istny, prawdziwy, swoisty. Some Remarks on their Semantic-syntactic Status The paper presents selected semantic and syntactic features of lexemes istny ‘veritable’, prawdziwy 2 ‘true’, and swoisty 2 ‘specific’ (the last one has not been distinguished in lexicographic works so far). They are the Polish equivalents of those phrases which G. Lakoff includes in the class of linguistic hedges. Their function is not to distill vs obfuscate the meanings of words which they accompany in an utterance, but rather to signal the presence of the speaker and his or her choice of the appropriate predicate Y for a statement about X (about what I am talking about). The discussed phrases weaken the strength of an assertoric “statement that” because their meaning contains the component ‘X is not Y, it is only similar to it’. Dubbed unadjectival adjectives by M. Danielewiczowa, these units combine the formal features of both ordinary adjectives and metapredicative phrases, assuring them a unique place in the linguistic system.

Keywords

• adjective
• linguistic hedges
• metapredicative adjectives