THE ROLE OF PHRASAL STRESS IN THE INTERPRETATION OF POLYSEMOUS WORDS

A substantial body of literature explores the relationship between prosody and seman tics. Certain types of meanings are supposed to “attract” phrasal stress, such as verifi ca tion, emphasis, and negation: “He REALLY loves you”; “I will do it MYSELF”; “I have FEW friends.” Some dictionaries even incorporate details about lexicalized prosody, e. g., the “Dictionary of Russian Particles” by E. G. Shimchuk and M. G. Shchur, and the “Active Dictionary of the Russian Language” under the general direction of Yu. D. Apre syan. Some studies explore the influence of prosody on the interpretation of ambigu ous words. For instance, the phrase “She is a REAL queen” implies that she genuine ly belongs to the royalty, whereas “She is a real QUEEN” suggests only the likeness of her bearing to that of a true royal. Our study seeks to further investigate the infl uence of prosody on the interpretation of polysemous words. We assume that obligatory phras al stress is a relatively uncommon phenomenon and is associated with specifi c types of meanings outlined in the existing literature. Furthermore, we anticipate that the feasibi lity of phrasal stress correlates with broader principles governing polysemy organization. Specifi cally, we predict that in the literal senses of content words, phrasal stress is typically possible, whereas in their fi gurative and particularly in their semantically bleached and partially grammatica lized meanings, the capacity for prosodic emphasis diminishes. This phenomenon cannot be attributed solely to the general trend towards the loss of phonetic autonomy that accompanies semantic bleaching. We expect to demonstrate a correlation between the (im)possibility of phrasal stress and fi gurative vs. literal meanings.