Служебное новообразование «Если говорить…»: морфологический статус и коммуникативно-прагматический потенциал

Abstract

The study aims to identify the functional purpose of function units formed according to the model with a free lexical component – "Если говорить..." (If we talk) in the speech continuum. The scientific novelty of the paper lies in the fact that a group of units that are little studied in linguistic science, which can replenish the corpus of function words, is analysed. The paper describes possible lexico-grammatical implementations of the model "Если говорить...", considers the role of neologisms in the text in the for-mal-syntactic and communicative-pragmatic aspects. As a result, it has been proved that the model "Если говорить..." has two main lexico-grammatical variants: "Если говорить + о N6" (When it comes to…) and "Если говорить + Adv" (To put it…); function units formed within these schemes act as textual con-nectors or as parenthetical constructions, in addition, they serve as mode operators, explicating the com-municative intentions of the speech subject. The paper describes the pragmatic meanings of these mode operators. It has been concluded that the function units under consideration belong to the style of journal-ism and belles-lettres, where the author of speech uses all the lexical resources of the language to achieve a communicative effect and meet the expectations of the speech addressee.