Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Ágnes Deli: Meaning with lexical repetition

Three questions arise on closer investigation of the meaning of the initiating utterance: 1. how many interpreations of work are involved? 2. can the meaning of the word be specific while it is usually meant to be unspecific? 3. how are the various shifts of meaning marked prosodically? Let us do a step-by step interpetation of the discourse. The first noun determined by the definite article in utterance B

1 has anaphoric reference, and the topic of the conversation being a housewife's job, it refers back to that. The second appearance of the same noun seems related to a more general meaning of the word: work in the broad sense, a purposeful activity which involves an effort. The 'specific' meaning is grammatically marked by the definite article, whereas the generic meaning is implied by the zero article. The zero article not only marks the generic reference of the noun, but also gives it the status of the superordinate member of a hy pony my. In this respect the repeated lexical item work represents the realization of a semantic change which arises in the course of the conversation. For this special relationship between the repeated lexical items I propose the term existential hyponymy. 'Existential" is used here after Brazil (1985), and is taken from his term existential paradigm, meaning the here-and-now reference at a specific time and place, a unique conversational setting and the peculiar understanding between speaker and hearer as opposed to some general, permanent feature of understanding. Existential paradigms are "that set of possibilities that a speaker can regard as actually available in a given situation" (1985:41). The third occurrence of the noun work in move ~B2 implies yet another semantic change which can be interpreted in the light of the prosodic features of the following utterance: // because it's NOT PAI

D //. Paid work is the third member of the hyponymy. Speaker A's acknowledgement in utterance ~A1 is a mere repetition of the hypernym work used by speaker B in the last tone unit of utterance Bl, i.e. work in the general meaning. This is clearly indicated by the speaker's decision to make the word non-prominent, as it usually 107