The meaning and interpretation of the Serbian discourse marker BRE

Abstract

Bre is a word whose origin is neither exclusively tied to the Serbian language, nor is it even derived from the elements of the South Slavic languages. Nonetheless, it has come to serve as a most prominent typically Serbian linguistic item to the extent that a number of people in the social networks in Serbia (e.g. Facebook) have been signed in with the discourse marker bre between the first and the last names, in the place of the middle name (e.g. Jovan Bre Marković).This “small” bre (as Kapor (1989:9) would qualify it with the Serbian adjective malo) – inconspicuous, as it were – has a potential of an important accompaniment to the tune of a Serbian expression, to use a music metaphor. This has presented us with a challenge worthy of a deeper investigation: bre, clearly, contributes to the meaning of an utterance in which it occurs, but the question is what kind of contribution.Working within the relevance-theoretic framework (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95; Blakemore, 2002; Carston, 2002), we explore the issue of how this discourse marker contributes to the relevance of its host utterance. We conduct our analysis around the cognitive semantic distinction between conceptual and procedural types of meaning and the pragmatic distinction between explicitly and implicitly communicated assumptions by the speaker's utterance.Basing our findings on a corpus collected from Serbian newspapers and magazines as well as face-to-face exchanges, we conclude that bre is a procedural constraint on the construction of a higher-level explicature which expresses a speaker's particular attitude to the addressee.