Page 14 - Dalle origini ai giorni nostri: convergenze e divergenze tra lingue slave

Paola Bocale

Research conducted in a variety of languages, starting from the stud-
ies of Thompson and Mulac (1991), Thompson (2002), Kärkkäinen (2003),
Keevallik (2006; 2011), Laury and Okamoto (2011), Maschler (2012), to the
more recent special issues of the Journal of Pragmatics (Lindström et al.
2016) and Folia Linguistica (Grzech et al. 2020), have shown that in spon-
taneous speech negative epistemic predicates often appear without any
complement. Frequently reduced morphophonologically and syntactically,
they tend to grammaticalize into discourse markers, i.e. devices endowed
with specific cognitive, interactional and metatextual functions (Maschler
2012; Pekarek Doehler 2016; Debras 2021). This tendency is in line with the
process of bleaching toward pragmaticalization (Diewald 2011), a particu-
lar type of grammaticalization which has been documented for comple-
3
ment taking predicates, that are inclined to move into discourse markers
or markers of epistemic stance (Pekarek Doehler 2011).
The verbs of the semantic field to know are particularly suitable for be-
coming discourse markers due to their semantics which refers to a shared
knowledge between speaker and interlocutor. For this reason, they are
used both in interactional functions, to control contact with the inter-
locutor, and to focus segments of information. It is thus essential to in-
vestigate the uses of ja ne znaju in discourse in order to find out for what
purposes it is used beyond denying epistemic access, i.e. the fact that
speakers manifest the possession of a certain knowledge.
The corpus is made up of 43 recordings of radio interviews broadcast
on various programmes of the Russian radio channel Echo Moskvy be-
4
tween 2015 and 2021, for a total duration of 39 hours (173639 words) .
Throughout the corpus, 238 occurrences of the construction (subj)-neg-
pred znat’ were found. Of these, 176 (74%) were in the first person singu-
lar present, i.e. they consisted of the construction ja ne znaju, composed
of the negative operator ne followed by the verb znat’ in the present sin-

3 In this paper grammaticalization is understood as “the change whereby lexical
items and constructions come in certain linguistic contexts to serve grammatical
functions, and once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical fun-
ctions” (Hopper and Traugott 2003, 18).
4 The Radio Ècho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) was a radio station based in Moscow. In
March 2022, it was closed down by Roskomnadzor, the Russian state media watch-
dog, as a result of its coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The station used
to post transcripts of many of its broadcasts, as well as audio and clips, on its web-
site. The transcripts were not entirely faithful to the original audio files, but, with
the sound track, they could be fixed to give a correct representation of the inter-
views.

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