THE DISCURSIVE FUNCTIONS OF „HAJDE“: SOME CONSIDERATIONS FOR A RELEVANCE THEORETIC APPROACH

Abstract

The paper presents a relevance-theoretic analysis of the Serbian secondary interjection hajde (and its interjectional variants). The corpus material of 45 randomly selected examples is analyzed using qualitative methodology, focusing on the foregrounding and backgrounding of encyclopedic assumptions during ad-hoc concept construction. The results of the analysis show that hajde shifts the order of encyclopedic content in comparison with its imperative pro-concept, with previously foregrounded assumptions becoming backgrounded or entirely erased. However, the conceptualist approach is insufficient to fully explain the meaning of this lexeme. The analysis shows that hajde encodes both conceptual and procedural content, meaning that the processes of ad-hoc concept construction (conceptual component) and grammaticalization (procedural component) occur simultaneously. In other words, the findings obtained through the qualitative analysis suggest that the existing theoretical model should be complemented by insights from procedural semantics to account for the multifaceted nature of the selected expression.