PRAGMATICALISATION ET POLYSÉMIE DE LA PARTICULE AȘA DU ROUMAIN CONTEMPORAIN. UNE PERSPECTIVE TYPOLOGIQUE ET CONTRASTIVE

Pragmaticalization and Polysemy of the Particle așa in Contemporary Romanian Language. A Typological and Contrastive Approach. This article pursues the series of studies we have previously devoted to the pragmaticalization and discursive functioning of (spatial, temporal or modal) adverbs in contemporary Romanian language (atunci, altfel, de altfel, apoi, etc.).This time, our approach aims at outlining the discursive status of the particle așa in contemporary Romanian, in order to emphasize that this lexical item frequently acquires – by itself or in more or less fixed, lexicalized expressions – complex pragmatic and discursive values, often hard to distinguish from one another. This semantic-pragmatic behaviour (which, surprisingly, has not been extensively debated by Romanian linguists) could be explained, from our point of view, by the fact that the deictic and anaphoric core meaning of this lexical item has a much wider abstract content than the temporal or spatial adverbs we have previously analysed, as such a meaning often needs, in the communicative process, a non-verbal informative “addition” (frequently, an indicative gesture). Thus, this core meaning is the one that allows and favours the numerous discursive-pragmatic values of the analysed particle in contemporary Romanian.