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Epistemic and pragmatic functions
2
of ja ne znaju ‘I don’t know’
in contemporary Russian

Paola Bocale
Università degli Studi dell’Insubria, Italia
paola.bocale@uninsubria.it
© 2024 Paola Bocale
https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-380-7.11-28

Introduction

In contemporary Russian, the construction ja ne znaju ‘I don’t know’ seems
to have interesting epistemic and pragmatic functions when it occurs in
1
certain syntactic environments. Knowledge disclaimers have been inves-
tigated in different languages and settings (Tsui 1991; Beach and Metzger
1997; Scheibmann 2000; Hutchby 2002; Potter 2004; Weatherall 2011;
Helmer et al. 2016; Jager et al. 2016; Van der Meij et al. 2022). However,
specific research on epistemic stance-taking in Russian has been scarce,
2
in particular in what concerns knowledge disclaimers in this language .
This paper aims to partially fill this gap in literature by examining the
formal and informational features of ja ne znaju in a corpus of Russian ra-
dio interviews.

Ja ne znaju
The verb znat’ ‘to know’ is traditionally considered as a transitive verb tak-
ing two arguments, one for the knowing entity, the other for the matter
known. Syntactically, ja ne znaju is a complement-taking predicate (CTP),
that is a verbal predicate that takes a sentential predicate as a complement,
evaluating its truth-value (Pietrandrea 2018). The complement is usually a
complement clause, that can be introduced by čto ‘that’, or an infinitival VP.

ja ne znaju
I NEG know.1SG. PRES
1 De Haan’s (2001, 201) definition of epistemicity as “the degree of confidence the
speaker has in his or her statement” is adopted in this paper.
2 The few available works analyse the function of the construction ja ne znaju as a he-
sitation marker (Khan 2012), or the performative use of ja znaju ‘I know’ in the
Russian rock music of the 1990’s (Konkina 2017).

Cergol, J., e H. Bažec, cur. 2024. Dalle origini ai giorni nostri:
convergenze e divergenze tra lingue slave. Edizioni Università 11
del Litorale.