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

happens in those cases when the word is already "in the play", i.e. when it represents a 'given' item (for the communicative value of prominence see Brazil, 1985). In discourse the intended shifts of meaning, are mirrorred in the prosodic features of the repeated lexical items. Brazil (1985) emphasizes, that prominence is a feature which the speaker can change voluntarily, and that his decision is meaningful. It is this choice which carries some kind of communicative value in the discourse. Prominence choices represent the constraints which do not come from the language system as a whole, but from the interaction itself. Prominent syllables project a world of interaction as well as lexical discourse relations; they embody the speaker's assessment of the situation in terms of 'given' and 'new' information. Our extract shows it clearly that repeated lexical items can represent contextually new information, i.e. the speakers' choices from the existential paradigm. These items are always prominent: B

1: HO BUT THE // 0 THE // p the WQR

K // p // 0 IS // ///7i

s WORK// Al: //^OfCQISSE// B2: //p but NOT -Al: ackNOWledged // //p OF COURS

E // ~B2: //p as WOR

K //p because it's NOT ^^ //p ITS // ~A1: // p VERY HARD work // In extract [la] above the word 'work' occurs four times, out of which three times it is prominent. This sense selection is not incidental. It projects several senses of the word (cf. Figure 1 above, p. 109): a housewife's work (the first occurrence in move Bl), the general idea (the second occurrence in move Bl) and paid work (in move ~B2). The 'newness' of the meaning in the latter two cases is 108