TY - JOUR
TI - “From the Speaker’s Point of View” – Subjectification as Pragmatic-Semantic Language Change
AU - Pastuch, Magdalena
TI - “From the Speaker’s Point of View” – Subjectification as Pragmatic-Semantic Language Change
AB - The article demonstrates the importance of subjectification processes in shaping the metatextual layer of language. Using three lexical units (prawda ‘true, right’, pewnie ‘sure, certainly’ and szalenie ‘extremely, madly’) as examples, the author shows how the enrichment of their semantic structure with a subjective component led to the emergence of new propositional functions and ultimately to the establishment of a new meaning. The study is conducted diachronically, drawing on the oldest attestations of the lexemes in question. Based on a contextual analysis, the moment the meanings with a subjective component appeared is identified. The results unequivocally demonstrate that subjectification has its origin in the pragmatic domain, while its consequences are visible on the semantic level. The language material comes from both lexicographic sources and corpora. The analysis shows that subjectification is correlated with formal changes including loss of inflectional endings, loss of morphological properties, recategorization, and syntactic isolation. The paper provides evidence for the need for in-depth comparative diachronic research on subjectification.
VL - Volume 18 (2023)
IS - Vol. 18, Issue 4
PY - 2023
SN - 1732-8160
C1 - 2300-5920
SP - 145
EP - 167
DO - 10.4467/23005920SPL.23.007.18682
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/studies-in-polish-linguistics/article/from-the-speakers-point-of-view-subjectification-as-pragmatic-semantic-language-change
KW - diachrony
KW - history of the Polish language
KW - language change
KW - historical pragmatics
KW - subjectification
KW - metatextual expressions