Asymmetrical Aspects of Totally and Completely as a Freestanding Form

This study examines totally and completely in discourse, elaborating on their semantic preferences and freestanding form. They have been considered as virtually interchangeable without any significant differences in the meaning of utterances. Their lexical meanings and syntactic functions seem to be identical. However, their freestanding forms in spoken discourse do not tend to be equivalent. This study explicates the correlation between their semantic preferences and freestanding usage, in which totally combines with affirmative semantic preferences, while completely collocates with unaffirmative semantic preferences. The freestanding form of totally may be related with interactive pragmatics and it functions in various pragmatic roles such as a turn initiator which is utilized to respond to a previous speaker. A wide variety of pragmatic functions of the freestanding form can involve bridging device, agreement, enthusiasm, encouraging device, satisfaction, and solidarity device in spoken English. The aim of the current study is to describe how this linguistic phenomenon occurs and to achieve a better comprehension of their nature.