Macedonian ‘Da Ne’-Questions as Distance Markers

Mitkovska, Liljana and Buzarovska, Eleni and Kusevska, Marija (2015) Macedonian ‘Da Ne’-Questions as Distance Markers. In: Distance in Language. Cambridge Scholars Publisher, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, pp. 243-263. ISBN 978-1-4438-7261-4

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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, as well as
speech acts expressing 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 nequestions, 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 in which interlocutors understand the entailed discourse presuppositions. Characterized by solidarity and closeness da nequestions
are used as an indirect speech act strategy. Serving as markers of positive politeness they are employed by speakers to indicate small horizontal distance.

Item Type: Book Section
Subjects: Humanities > Languages and literature
Divisions: Faculty of Philology
Depositing User: Marija Kusevska
Date Deposited: 23 Mar 2015 09:39
Last Modified: 23 Mar 2015 09:39
URI: https://eprints.ugd.edu.mk/id/eprint/12956

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