THE AUTONYMOUS CONNOTATION. SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC ASPECTS

This paper aims at presenting one of the main characteristics of the natural language, that is its possibility to refer to everything, language included. Given the latter possibility, one can speak about reflexivity, which is one of the universals of the language, since every language has a set of forms by means of which it can refer to (one of) its elements, usually a word or a phrase. Moreover, the semantics and the syntax of such structures are quite similar, in different languages. Semantically, they are the result of some mismatches the speaker encounters throughout the discourse and show different degrees of „reality” of the propositional content, as well as a certain attitude of the speaker towards the language used. At the syntactic level, the reflexive move is marked by the use of a metalinguistic term and a determiner that might be metalinguistic or neutral. This configuration has been referred to either as autonymous connotation or autonymous modalisation, according to whether both values of the sign (use and mention) co-occur on the linguistic chain, or the sign is just mentioned. Here, the label autonymous connotation is used in a broad sense, to cover both realities described above