»Pa«, the reverser of argumentative expectation

Abstract

The conjunction pa is one of the formally (contextually) most diversified and most used lexemes of the Slovene language and by the same token also one of the most self-effacing, self-evident and thus least researched lexical units. The purpose of this paper is to point out a specific, argumentative form of the conjunction pa, a form which does not connect only two parts of the sentence as an abstract structure (which is the domain of the language), but also two speech acts as two segments of the discourse (which is the domain of the speech). We wish to demonstrate that the argumentative pa presents an enunciatory anaphoric element, which only with reference to some other, common, general, or at least preceding knowledge, delimits the discursive segment, whose part it is, as an interpretatively and argumentively relatively autonomous unit.