НЕДОИЗКАЗАНОСТ С АБЕ: ОТКАЗ ОТ ОТГОВОР, АГРЕСИЯ ИЛИ...?
STARTING WITH ABE AND STOPPING SHORT: REFUSAL TO ANSWER, AGGRESSION, OR…?

Summary/Abstract: Aposiopesis is not a figure of speech confined solely to rhetoric, drama, or fiction. The deliberate non-completion of an utterance also functions as an interactional device in naturally occurring conversation. This article examines a specific type of silence in Bulgarian, in which the initial, explicit part of the utterance is reduced to the pragmatic particle abe (a be), used either independently or in combination with the hortative particle ya. Drawing on speech act theory and subsequent work on (im)politeness, the analysis focuses on verbal reactions of the type Abe(e)/A be… and Abe(ee)/A be ya…, exploring the implicational potential of the particle in these incomplete utterances. The observations are based on examples drawn from internet communication, linguistic corpora and contemporary Bulgarian fiction.

• Details
• Contents