Page 18 - Dalle origini ai giorni nostri: convergenze e divergenze tra lingue slave

Paola Bocale

respondent refuses to give his opinion about the general state of the ‘fa-
therland’, i.e. Russia, the interlocutor is expecting to receive.
Similarly, in example (3) ja ne znaju mitigates the illocutionary force of
the utterance and smoothes the conversational interaction by downgrad-
ing the statement to a supposition about the real amount of money in the
budget and who might have more than thought.
Epistemic hedge

The previous examples illustrate that ja ne znaju has several character-
istics that might not be captured if we were to consider this construc-
tion only as an epistemic stance-marker. In many contexts ja ne znaju is
used to moderate the force of an utterance or the certainty of its content
(Neary-Sundquist 2013), inviting the listener to attribute a more indefi-
nite meaning to the context it refers to. In this way it seems to function
pragmatically as a hedge (Aijmer 1984; Hyland 1998; Weatherall 2011),
given that it makes the context vague rather than specific and precise.
In example (4), ja ne znaju softens the harsh depiction of p’janye ljudi
‘drunk men’, smoothing the way to the next definition. We can also see
how the construction reinforces its pragmatic function through the accu-
mulation of other hedging elements, i.e. the indefinite modifier kakie-to
5
and the adverb tam used as a mark of indefiniteness .
The way in which ja ne znaju works towards downgrading the preci-
sion of the statement is also evident in example (5), where the speaker

Example 4
I vychodjat na èti akcii ne kakie- tam
to
and go.out to these actions NEG certain there
ja ne znaju p’janye ljudi ne znaju otstalye
I NEG know drunk people NEG I.know backward
ljudi posmotrite na lica vychodjaščich èto vpolne simpatičnaja
people look to faces going.out this fully nice
molodež’ tam 27-30 let
youth there 27-30 years
And attend these events not, I don’t know, drunk people, I don’t know, backward people, look at
the faces of those who go out, they are quite nice young people about 27-30 years old
5 Research conducted by the author (Bocale 2018) has shown that the syntactic, se-
mantic and pragmatic environments under which distal deictics such as tam can
occur – hypothetical, counterfactual or otherwise modal, non-declarative, negati-
ve, indefinite, approximative, of continuation and enumeration, disjunctive, evi-
dential – share the feature of epistemic uncertainty, which is the “semantic com-
mon denominator to all sub-modes of irrealis” (Givón 1995, 121).

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