From desemantisation - to pragmaticalisation (on semantic and functional transformations of reduced forms of frequently used words in everyday speech)

The article describes some of reduced forms of frequently used words, which lose their lexical mean­ing (in whole or in part) and attain pragmatic meaning in some of their everyday speech usages. Thus we can trace the stages of the transition of reduced forms «from speech to language». On the way to lexicographic fixation, a speech unit should undergo several stages of change: phonological, semantic, pragmatic, etc. The processes of its desemantisation or «semantic bleaching», as well as its resemantisation broaden the scope of the contexts in which it can function. As a result, the part of speech, which the word belongs to, can change as well. Acquiring new semantics, pragmatics, prosody and syntactic independency, some lexical units trans­it to the pragmatic communicative level of the language and might become solely pragmatic units. Hence the processes of desemantisation, resemantisation and pragmaticalisation can lead to the emergence of an entire­ly new word.