Particles, Pragmatic and Other

Abstract

This paper deals with problems in describing, from a synchronic point of view, certain in Modern Greek like άραγe (I wonder), δήθeν (so-called, if), τάχα (so-called), called adverbs by Triantaphyllidis (1978), in his standard grammar of Modern Greek first published in 1941. In previous work I have shown that this class of linguistic items is a rather heterogeneous set from a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic point of view and that not all of them express hesitation on the speaker's part. But if they do not all deserve the name adverbs how else can they be described? At least some of these little words can be (and have been, cf. Tzartzanos 1953) described as particles. However, Zwicky has recently claimed that languages contain no 'par­ticles' but only words belonging to syntactic categories, clitics, and (inflectional or derivational) affixes” (Zwicky 1985: 294). Moreover, such little words have turned out to play an important role in pragmatic theories, as illocutionary force indicators, discourse markers, etc. Sometimes though, it is not sufficiently clear how the diversity of categories relates to the phenomena described or how the different categories relate to one another. Adequate answers to questions regarding the descriptive level as well as the relations between various descriptive categories used for such twilight zones of language is a necessary prerequisite for evaluating the different theories and the claims of universality with respect to such phenomena.