Face-saving strategies: the case of Hebrew SAY expressions
- Autores: Hagit Shefer
- Localización: Lingua: International review of general linguistics, ISSN 0024-3841, Nº 280, 2022
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The purpose of this article is to explain how three Hebrew say expressions, effar lomar (‘one might say’), eҳ lomar (‘how shall I put it’) and im lomar (‘to put it…’), have acquired the status of comment clauses, which fulfill a pragmatic function in the interpersonal realm. The article follows the emergence of these expressions throughout the history of the Hebrew language as they developed from speech verbs belonging to Sentence Grammar to syntactically independent comment clauses expressing (inter)subjective orientation. The analysis demonstrates the development of the three expressions in terms of syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic changes. The results suggest that, under the influence of context expansion and (inter)subjectivity, the three say expressions evolved as politeness strategies to prevent a threat to the hearer’s face by informing them of the manner in which the information is presented, and a threat to the speaker’s face by serving as hedging strategies. The analysis concludes that the three expressions display characteristics of both grammaticalization and pragmaticalization.
