ABSTRACT
In her introduction to a special issue on ‘particles’ of the Journal of Pragmatics, A.Wierzbicka (1986b) rejects various approaches to the analysis of particles (focus particles, modal particles, ‘approximatives’, etc.) in favour of her own ‘semantic primitives’ approach. The list of alternative approaches distinguished and rejected includes the ‘lexical equivalent’ approach (explaining particles in terms of one another), the ‘example of use’ approach (analysis on the basis of suggestive examples), the ‘abstract explanation’ approach (analysis in terms of abstract labels), the ‘radical pragmatics’ approach (parsimonious semantics, use of pragmatic principles to account for certain aspects of the meaning of utterance types), the ‘performative’ approach (analysis of particles as illocutionary force indicators) and the ‘logical’ approach (translation of sentences with particles into a formal language and specification of truth conditions). Wierzbicka’s own approach aims at capturing the semantic invariant of particles and expressing it in terms of a highly restricted inventory of elementary expressions (‘semantic primitives’) and simple syntactic constructions. These paraphrases must furthermore be substitutable for all uses of the particle in question salvo sensu.
