Page 22 - Dalle origini ai giorni nostri: convergenze e divergenze tra lingue slave

Paola Bocale

Example 9
Čem bystree russkie liberaly budut voschodit’ k tradicii
than faster Russian liberals they.will go.back to tradition
russkogo liberalizma k kadetskoj tradicii nu Gercena ja
Russian liberalism to Cadet tradition well Herzen I
ne sčitaju liberalom Gercen byl radikalom v celom
NEG consider liberal Herzen was radical in whole
nu ne znaju tam k časti dekabristskogo dviženija
well NEG I.know there to part Decembrist movement
čem bystree oni vspomnjat
than faster they will.remember
The faster Russian liberals go back to the tradition of Russian liberalism to the Cadet tradition,
well, I don’t consider Herzen a liberal Herzen was a radical in general, I don’t know, to part of the
Decembrist movement, the faster they remember

turns by indexing an orientation to the upcoming turn as departing from
a straight confirmation to a polar question. In this environment, ja ne zna-
ju prefaces a ‘non-conforming response’ (Raymond 2003; Heritage 2015;
Pekarek Doehler 2022), or a ‘prefatory epistemic disclaimer’ (Schegloff
1996), that is its use alerts the interlocutor that the turn will depart both
from the grammatical constraints of the question, and the agenda that
it expresses. In this function it is sometimes preceded or immediate-
ly followed by the particle nu ‘well’, which is specialised in prefacing re-
sponses that are misaligned vis-à-vis the initiating action (Bolden 2018).
In example 10, the discussion has been evolving around the chronic fail-
ure of opposition leaders to realize their aims and create a viable alli-
ance. Ja ne znaju here serves as a general alert to the recipient about the
non-straightforwardness of the upcoming answer.
Conversely, in turn-final position in responses to questions, such as in
example (11), ja ne znaju acts as a turn-exit device in a moment when such
exit is not justified by conditional relevance, i.e. at a time when the next
normatively envisaged action has not yet been performed and the turn is
pragmatically incomplete.
Another functional property of ja ne znaju which was identified in the
corpus is its employment to steer away from topics which might lead to
disagreement. It is thus part of a move to prevent possible face threat-
ening acts (Brown and Levinson 1978; 1987) between the interlocutors.
Example (12) may serve as an illustration. Here used in turn-initial po-
sition, ja ne znaju serves as a weak denial marker to show the speaker’s
disagreement in a context where the use of net ‘no’ would signal a much
stronger overt non-agreement.

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