'Omen' partikularen azterketa semantikoa eta pragmatikoa

Abstract

The aim of the present work is to provide a brief account of the main semantic and pragmatic properties of the Basque reportative particle 'omen'. I contend that by using 'omen' the speaker states that the reported proposition has been said (or written) by someone other than herself. 'Omen' has no other semantic meaning. In my view, the speaker's expression of uncertainty often attached to 'omen', if present, belongs to the pragmatic content of the utterance, and, more precisely, it is a generalized conversational implicature of the 'omen'-utterance. Grice's (1967a, 1967b) cancellability 'test' and the data from several corpora support this conclusion. I will also contend that the role of 'omen' is best interpreted as contributing to the truth-conditions or propositional content of the utterance, and not to its illocutionary force or presuppositions. Two tests support this conclusion. Besides that, I distinguish between (at least) three contents in an 'omen'-utterance, based in the nature of the original speaker. Moreover the results of another test (which can be called reportability test) show that the speakers tend not to use 'omen' to report non-literal contents. Finally, I will consider the translations of 'omen'.