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

gular tense, sometimes preceded by the first person pronoun ja (Table 1).
These 176 occurrences of (ja) ne znaju make up the database of the pres-
ent study (see table 1).

Table 1 Ja ne znaju tokens in the corpus
(sogg)-neg-pred znat’ (ja) ne znaju ja ne znaju ne znaju
(with 1 person pronoun) (without 1 person pronoun)
st
st
238 176/238 74% 97/176 55% 79/176 45%
With regards to the syntactic features, table 2 shows how the 176 (ja)
ne znaju occurrences are distributed according to the object complement.
More than half of the tokens (58%) occur without any object complement,
a third (33%) with a clause, and small percentages with a NP (5.6%), or a
question word (3%) (see table 2).

Table 2 Distribution of ja ne znaju according to the syntactic category of object
complement
OBJECT COMPLEMENT N (%)
Ø 102 58%
94%
Clause 58 33%
question word 6 3%
NP 10 5.6% 5.7%
Total 176 100%

Turning to the functional characteristics of the ja ne znaju construc-
tion according to the object complement, the investigation reveals that
its uses with zero object complement perform the widest array of func-
tions, from the full epistemic employment as a stance of ignorance and
uncertainty, to the more pragmatic uses as an epistemic hedge, marker of
reformulation (paraphrasing, correction, exemplification, clarification),
device for topic-shift employed in order to avoid a face-threatening act,
and marker of enumeration. The more epistemic functions are performed
when ja ne znaju is followed by a question word or a NP, whereas the prag-
matic functions drastically decline and practically disappear when the
object complement is a question word (see table 3).

Epistemic stance of ignorance and uncertainty
We begin with the full epistemic employment of ja ne znaju, i.e. when it
conveys the speakers’ unwillingness or inability to express their epistem-

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