Abstract
The morphosyntactic status and the semantic value of the lexeme oare in present-day Romanian continue to raise questions. The few existing studies in Romanian and foreign linguistic literature have emphasized its mobility and discursive polyfunctionality, and analyzed it as an epistemic modal adverb expressing uncertainty or doubt (see GR 2013: 583), as an additional marker/particle of questions, as speech acts (GALR 2008, II: 714‒715) or as a formative in the structure of indefinite pronouns and adverbs oarecare, oarecine, oarece, oarecum ”certain, somehow, etc.”, with the meaning of ”free choice” (Dinică 2012: 154). Our contribution proposes an integrative functional analysis (i.e. pragmadiscursive) of oare which emphasizes that it operates at different communicative levels, with fuzzy boundaries between its modal epistemic and/or evidential values and its uses as an illocutionary force modifier. Our hypothesis is that in present-day Romanian, oare is a discursive particle functioning as an illocutionary force modifier with an epistemic-evidential and/or mirative meaning, which displays various contextual values.