Macedonian ‘da ne’ questions as distance markers

Mitkovska, Liljana and Buzarovska, Eleni and Kusevska, Marija (2013) Macedonian ‘da ne’ questions as distance markers. In: Distance in Language, Language of Distance, 5-6 Apr 2013, Institute of Slavonic Philology at the LMU Munich, Germany.

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Abstract

This paper looks into discourse functions of Macedonian constructions containing the modal particle da and the negative marker ne, such as: Da ne imaš malku kafe? ‘Do you happen to have some coffee?’ or Da ne ti e lošo? ‘You aren’t feeling very well, are you?’ The collocation of these two modal particles results in a fused interrogative epistemic marker da ne. It is used to form a specific type of biased polar questions that have a wide distribution in various speech acts such as requests, warnings, praise, concern, irony, etc. Because they do not impose anything directly these questions seem to evoke politeness. The aim of our paper is to investigate the distance expressed in such da ne-questions which we attribute to the semantics of bias and the pragmatics of common ground. The analysis shows that da ne-questions are used felicitously in situations where interlocutors understand the entailed discourse presuppositions. Characterized by solidarity and closeness da ne-questions are used as an indirect speech act strategy. Serving as markers of positive politeness they are employed by speakers to indicate small horizontal distance.
Key words: modal particle, biased question, epistemic marker, indirect speech act, pragmatic distance, solidarity

Item Type: Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Subjects: Humanities > Languages and literature
Divisions: Faculty of Philology
Depositing User: Marija Kusevska
Date Deposited: 27 Dec 2013 14:24
Last Modified: 10 Aug 2015 08:30
URI: https://eprints.ugd.edu.mk/id/eprint/8571

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