Pragmatic particles indicating expectation—The case of Persze

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to introduce the Hungarian pragmatic marker persze through its versatile function in the language and to collect evidence that it can also occur as a marker of epistemic modality. Persze is particularly salient in oral communication, where it relates its host unit to the previous utterance and has a variable scope ranging from a single lexical item to a whole paragraph. It preserved its core meaning in all of its occurrences, namely pinpointing the self-evidence of the truth of the proposition it stands with and encodes a specific epistemic attitude of the speaker to the proposition expressed by the clause in which persze appears.