Модальні частки української, німецької та угорської мов як засоби посилення релевантності висловлення

The article analyzes the functions of modal particles in Ukrainian, German and Hungarian from a relevance-theoretic perspective. The research shows that the main function of modal particles in the three languages lies in raising the relevance of the utterance. This function is realized through two types of contextual effects. A typological study of languages that are related or not becomes increasingly important in the situation where one can observe increased international contacts of nowadays, where every nation struggles to define its place in the globalised world, where studies consider the issues of intercultural relations and influences. The scope of our research is 2534 textual fragments demonstrating functions of modal particles in fiction. Our sample is obtained from Ukrainian, German ad Hungarian prose of the second part of the XX – beginning of the XXI centuries. The research is based on the theory of relevance by D. Sperber and D. Wilson. The scientists consider verbal communication as a process of correct interpretation of the speaker’s intention provided that information is relevant. Information is relevant if it interacts with our other knowledge about the world in a certain way. Ukrainian modal particles show a tendency to mark negative contextual effect. We can presuppose that Ukrainian possesses more implicit means of signaling the assumption that a speaker may be of an opinion different than that of an addressee or than is generally believed. Using such means, namely modal particles, is one of the strategies of negative linguistic politeness, which can be seen in a certain level of world-view and speech tolerance. The ratio of positive to negative means of realizing contextual effect in German and Hungarian is basically the same (6 and 8, 8 and 6 correspondingly), which demonstrates that due to social and historical tendencies in the development of the peoples there were no conditions necessary to imbalance speech means implying the disagreement of the addressee with the information that is being reported. Promising is a detailed research of how modal particles combine, i.e. of the process characteristic of dialogical speech where several particles are used at the same time, of semantic and functional load that they carry.