GETTING IT ACROSS THE TABLE: THE MANIFESTLY DISCOURSE ADVERBIALS REVISITED

Abstract

The paper reconsiders the semantic and pragmatic roles of a subset of parenthetical linguistic expressions that typically go under a general heading of sentence (or sentential) adverbs (or adverbials) or pragmatic markers. The subset comprises expressions that encode the speaker’s strongest subjective stance to the proposition expressed by the utterance (e.g. the English expressions obviously, clearly, evidently, certainly and surely, and their Serbian counterparts očigledno, jasno, sigurno and svakako). Given the main, theoretic, orientation of the paper, however, the contrastive issue had to be neglected. Still, the paper gives an impetus for contrastive studies, in particular, regarding the encoded linguistic meaning in relation to interactional import. An accumulation of contrastive data, and analyses thereof, will contribute not only to re-evaluating and refining what we have come to know about encoded meaning, but also, and more importantly, to solving the contentious issue of the strict conceptual/procedural dichotomy.