PRAGMATICALIZATION IN EVERYDAY SPEECH

This paper deals with the pragmaticalization of linguistic units when used in everyday speech. It discusses two phenomena that often accompany the pragmaticalization, namely, pragmatic obligatoriness and semantic “bleaching.”
A discourse word is regarded to be “pragmatically obligatory” in a given communicative situation if native speakers tend to use it in that situation even though they do not seek to express the associated meaning. The lack of the proper discourse word where the communicative situation calls for it every so often may lead to wrong implicatures  or disrupt the coherence of the text. To illustrate the point, the paper uses markers of insuffi cient or incomplete reliability (two types of incomplete reliability are distinguished: uncertainty and assumption), in particular, the use of the words vrode (literally, ‘like’) and mozhet (byt’) (‘maybe’), which is characteristic of colloqial speech. 
“Semantic bleaching” takes place when a word tends to occur (especially in certain idiolects) in contexts where it apparently conveys no meaning (hence the term “parasitic words”). The paper pays special attention to the markers that express the general idea of brevity of speech, namely, znachit (literally, ‘it means), koroche (literally, ‘more shortly’), and v obshchem (‘in general’).
The ways of pragmaticalization are various, and, accordingly, the phenomena accompanying pragmaticalization are not characteristic of every given path. The paper makes an attempt to substantiate the need for a thorough analysis of each linguistic expression “suspected” of completing the pragmaticalization process. Such analysis may be useful in creating lexicographic descriptions of the expressions under consideration, including their lexicographic portraits.