Kirkovska I. Category of Restriction in Modern French: Semantic, Structural, Communicative and Pragmatic Aspects

This thesis focuses on the study of the category of restriction in modern French by way of identifying its linguistic and speech meanings as well as establishing the corpus of corresponding forms with regard to communicative and pragmatic peculiarities of their usage. The category of restriction which pertains to the notion of limitation is examined in the semantic continuum of the categories of affirmation and negation from the psychosystematics perspective via applying "positional linguistics" methodology. In French the restriction sign ne… que has a syncretic meaning of both affirmation and negation. The category itself is viewed as a bicentral functional and semantic macrofield which comprises two microfields: affirmative-restrictive and negatory-restrictive, while retaining the possibility to produce new derivatives.