Marusynets M. The functions of particles in expressing sentence modality (studies based on the corpus of Ukrainian, German, Hungarian)

The dissertation analyzes the functions of modal particles in Ukrainian, German and Hungarian. Modal particles are studied in terms of their lexical characteristics, semantic structure, communicative and pragmatic potential. The research aspects also include the part-of-speech status and identification criteria of modal particles.. It is argued that the main function of modal particles in Ukrainian, German and Hungarian is to increase the relevance of the utterance. This function is realized through the ability of modal particles to generate a contextual effect - an adequate interpretation of the utterance content through relevant inferences. Particles serve as tools for utterance interpretation by guiding the hearer towards selecting relevant contexts. The research findings show that modal particles in Ukrainian, German and Hungarian fall into two opposing functional types as markers of the positive vs. negative contextual effect. The languages under research share a tendency toward marking the negative contextual effect and intensifying the illocutionary force of the utterance. Despite considerable commonality in terms of their communicative, pragmatic and cognitive potential, the modal particles in each of the three languages have unique lexical and semantic properties. The contrastive analysis shows a predominance of lexical equivalents between Ukrainian and German.