Alyeksyeyeva I. Semantics and Pragmatics of English Particles.

The thesis focuses on the problem of particles in the English language. The issue is still under discussion because, though agreeing on the existence of the particles as a part of speech, linguists have not yet arrived at any unanimous opinion as to the status and constituents of the class. The investigation has proved that distinguishing features of the English particles must be reduced to semantic and pragmatic ones only because, firstly, the absence of any paradigm excludes morphological characteristics form a set of differentiating criteria and, secondly, syntactically particles do not show common peculiarities either: some of them have almost unlimited valency and positional variation whereas others are restricted in both spheres. The only stable syntactic feature of the particles is that of accompanying rhematic components of utterances.