Page 29 - Dalle origini ai giorni nostri: convergenze e divergenze tra lingue slave

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

Pietrandrea, P. 2018. ‘Epistemic Constructions at Work. A Corpus Study
on Spoken Italian Dialogues.’ Journal of Pragmatics 128: 171–191.
Potter, J. 2004. ‘Discourse Analysis as a Way of Analysing Naturally
Occurring Talk.’ In Qualitative Analysis: Issues of Theory and Method,
edited by D. Silverman, 2nd ed., 200–221. London: Sage.
Raymond, G. 2003. ‘Grammar and Social Organization: Yes/No
Interrogatives and the Structure of Responding.’ American
Sociological Review 68:939–967.
Schegloff, E. 1996. ‘Turn Organization: One Intersection of Grammar
and Interaction.’ In Interaction and Grammar, edited by E. Ochs,
E. Schegloff and S. A. Thompson, 52–133. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Scheibmann, J. 2000. ‘I Dunno: A Usage-Based Account of the
Phonological Reduction of Don’t in American English Conversation.’
Journal of Pragmatics 32:105–124.
Thompson, S. A. 2002. ‘Object Complements and Conversation: Towards
a Realistic Account.’ Studies in Language 26:125–163.
Thompson, S. A., and A. Mulac. 1991. ‘A Quantitative Perspective on
the Grammaticization of Epistemic Parentheticals in English.’ In
Approaches to Grammaticalization, edited by E.C. Traugott and B.
Heine, vol. 2, 313–329. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Tsui, B. M. 1991. ‘The Pragmatic Functions of I Don’t Know.’ TEXT: An
Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 11: 607–622.
Van der Meij, S., M. Gosen, and A. Willemsen. 2022. ‘“Yes? I Have No
Idea”: Teacher Turns Containing Epistemic Disclaimers in Upper
Primary School Whole-Class Discussions.’ Classroom Discourse 15 (1).
https://doi.org/10.1080/19463014.2022.2103008.
Weatherall, A. 2011. ‘I Don’t Know as a Prepositioned Epistemic Hedge.’
Research on Language and Social Interaction 44 (4): 317–337.

Epistemic and pragmatic functions of ja ne znaju
‘I don’t know’ in contemporary Russian
This paper presents the structural and functional features of the
Russian construction ja ne znaju ‘I don’t know’. This construction
seems to have interesting epistemic and pragmatic functions when
it occurs in specific syntactic contexts in contemporary Russian
speech. Specifically, the different structural contexts in which ja
ne znaju occurs will be classified with the aim of attributing a pre-
cise functional value to each of them. The analysis will focus on the
pragmatic and functional aspects, starting from the relationship
that seems to exist between formal characteristics and the infor-
mation side.

27