NON-OBLIGATORY COMPONENTS OF UTT ERANCES (NEW APPROACH TO “EMPTY WORDS”)

The article is focused on lexical units that seem to be unnecessary for delivering new information. The most typical class of “empty words” are hesitators or time fillers. Using such words is often regarded as the violation of rhetoric rules. Still some cases are regarded as more relevant than others. The article analyses this phenomenon highlighting the role of the modal frame of an utterance. It is declared that some words verbalizing modal frame and other nuances that are expressed by the speech acts (the sense of addressing, uttering etc.) are non-obligatory but nevertheless can be expressed by verbs and particles. This expressing can be a mode of hesitating still it looks like ‘legal’ usage of these words. Such hesitators are not regarded as the speech rules violation while others that cannot be justified by such explanation, are.