ABSTRACT
Lexical Functions in the sense of the Meaning – Text Theory by Igor Mel′čuk have been shown to be useful for several purposes. They are instrumental in organizing the combinatorial potential of words in the dictionary, they can be beneficial for lexical and syntactic disambiguation, idiomatic translation of lexically-bound phrases, synonymous paraphrasing and language learning. We show that they have a role to play in the semantic analysis aiming at producing inferences. We discuss an important group of lexical functions – fulfilment collocations Reali – Facti – Labrealij (attain one’s aim, satisfy one’s curiosity, follow smb’s advice, an attempt succeeds, an illusion dissolves, etc.). There is a large class of inferences that can be performed on the basis of these collocations. Fulfilment collocations only appear in the context of modality (‘want’, ‘must’, ‘aim’, ‘expect’, etc.). We show that their semantic impact consists in “demodalizing” a proposition, i.e. converting a modalized proposition into a non-modal assertion. He took the opportunity to go to the concert = Real + ‘possible [to go to the concert]’ ⇒ ‘he went to the concert’.
ORCID
Игорь Богуславский http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3390-1449
Notes
1 Работа была поддержана грантом Российского научного фонда (РНФ № 16-18-10422.). Автор признателен анонимным рецензентам за проницательные замечания.
2 Здесь и ниже мы будем активно пользоваться материалами из (Апресян и др. Citation2007) и (Апресян Citation2018).
3 Впрочем, ниже мы увидим, что утверждение о пропозициональном тождестве этих функций не всегда справедливо.