delicious recipe
resep masakan indonesia
resep masakan indonesia
Adi Sucipto News and Entertainment

‘Knowing How’ in Slovene: Treading the Other Path

Barbara Sonnenhauser

Abstract


For the linguistic expression of the concept of knowledge, the Slavic languages use verbs deriving from the Indo-European roots *ĝnō and *ṷei̭d. They differ in terms of the availability of both types of verbs in the contemporary standard languages and in terms of their semantic range. As will be shown in this paper, these differences are interesting not only from a language-specific lexicological point of view, but also in the context of the intersection of lexicon and grammar. Covering the domain of ‘knowing how,’ the *ĝnō-based verb in Slovene (znati) has been extending into the domain of possibility and, on this basis, developing into a modal verb. While this development is not surprising from a typological point of view, it is remarkable from a Slavic perspective, since this particular grammaticalisation path towards possibility is otherwise unknown to Slavic. This peculiar feature of Slovene, which most probably relates to its long-lasting and intensive contact with German, is illustrated in the present paper by comparing Slovene to Russian on the basis of three main questions: 1) the semantic range of vedeti / vedatʹ and znati / znatʹ, 2) the lexicalisation of ‘know how,’ and 3) the relation between knowledge, ability, and possibility. The focus is on contemporary Slovene and Russian, leaving a detailed diachronic investigation and the further embedding into a larger Slavic and areal perspective for future analyses.

Keywords


knowledge; ability; modality; Slovene; Russian

Full Text:

PDF

References


Apresyan Yu. D., “Deiksis v leksike i grammatike i naivnaia modelʹ mira,” Semiotics and Informatics, 28, 1986, 5–33.

Apresyan Yu. D., “The Problem of Factivity: Russian znatʹ ‘to Know’ and Its Synonyms,” Voprosy jazykoznanija, 4, 1995, 43–63.

Apresyan Yu. D., “Znanie,” “Znatʹ,” in: Yu. D. Apresyan, ed., The New Explanatory Dictionary of Russian Synonyms (= Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 60), 2nd edition, Moscow, Vienna, 2004, 389–402.

Auwera J., van der, Plungian V. A., “Modality’s Semantic Map,” Linguistic Typology, 2, 1998, 79–124.

Belyaeva E. I., “Vozmozhnostʹ,” in: A. V. Bondarko, ed., Teoriia funktsionalʹnoi grammatiki. Temporalʹnostʹ. Modalʹnostʹ, Leningrad, 1990, 126–142.

Belyaeva-Standen Y., “The Functional-pragmatic Field of Possibility in Russian: Meaning and Structure,” Language Sciences, 25, 2002, 239–262.

Buck C. D., A Dictionary of Selected Synonyms in the Principal European Languages, Chicago, 1949.

Bybee J., Perkins R., Pagliuca W., The Evolution of Grammar: Tense, Aspect, and Modality in the Languages of the World, Chicago, 1994.

Erjavec T., “The IMP Historical Slovene Language Resources,” Language resources and evaluation, 49/3, 2015, 753–775.

Grković-Mejdžor J., Spisi iz istorijske lingvistike, Novi Sad, 2007.

Hansen B., Das slavische Modalauxiliar. Semantik und Grammatikalisierung im Russischen, Polnischen, Serbischen/Kroatischen und Altkirchenslavischen, München, 2001.

Haspelmath M., “How Young is Standard Average European?” Language Sciences, 29/3, 1998, 271–287.

Kiefer F., “Modality and pragmatics,” Folia Linguistica, 31/3-4, 1997, 241–253.

Klimov G. A., “Characteristics of Languages of Active Structure,” Voprosy jazykoznanija, 4, 1972, 3–3.

Koptjevskaja-Tamm M., “New Directions in Lexical Typology,” Linguistics, 50/3, 2012, 373–394.

Kratzer A., “The Notional Category of Modality,” in: P. Portner, B. Partee, eds., Formal Semantics. The Essential Readings, Oxford, 2002, 289–323.

Maier J., “Abilities,” in: E. N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall Edition, 2014 (available online: http://plato.stanford.edu/; accessed on 2016-12-13).

Marušič F. L., Žaucer R., “The Modal Cycle vs. Negation in Slovene,” in: Eidem, eds., Formal Studies in Slovenian syntax. In Honor of Janez Orešnik (= Linguistics Today, 236), Amsterdam, Philadelphia, 2016, 167–191.

Mele A. R., “Agents’ Abilities,” Noûs, 37/3, 2003, 447–470.

Narrog H., Modality, Subjectivity, and Semantic Change, Oxford, 2012.

Newerkla S., “Sprachliche Konvergenzprozesse in Mitteleuropa,” in: I. Pospíšil, ed., Crossroads of Cultures: Central Europe (= Litteraria humanitas, 11), Brno, 2002, 211–236.

Popović I., Geschichte der Serbokroatischen Sprache, Wiesbaden, 1960.

Ptentsova A. V., “Semanticheskaia oppozitsiia glagolov znati i věděti na materiale russkikh originalʹnykh pamiatnikov XI–XVI vv.,” Die Welt der Slaven, 53, 2008, 265–278.

Rakhilina E. V., Plungian V. A., “On the Lexical-semantic Typology,” in: T. A. Maisak, E. V. Rakhilina, eds., Verbs of Aqua-motion: Lexical Typology, Moscow, 2007, 9–26.

Roeder C., Hansen B., “Modals in Contemporary Slovene,” Wiener Slavistisches Jahrbuch, 52, 2006, 153–170.

Ryle G., “Knowing How and Knowing That,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. New Series, 46, 1945, 1–16.

Sonnenhauser B., “The ‘Potential Reading’ in Russian,” Russian Linguistics, 32/3, 2008, 185–201.

Sonnenhauser B., “Wissen, kennen, können: znati als Modalverb im Slovenischen,” in: H. Pitsch, ed., Beiträge zur Slavistik, 21, München, 2014, 177–197.

Stanley J., “Knowing (How),” Noûs, 45/2, 2011, 207–238.

Vendler Z., “Verbs and Times,” The Philosophical Review, 66/2, 1957, 143–160.

von Waldenfels R., “Recent Developments in ParaSol: Breadth for Depth and XSLT Based Web Concordancing with CWB,” in: D. Majchráková, R. Garabík, eds., Natural Language Processing; Multilinguality. Proceedings of Slovko 2011, Modra, Slovakia, 20–21 October 2011, Bratislava, 2011, 156–162.

Watkins C., The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, Boston, New York, 1985.


Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.




Copyright (c) 2017 Barbara Sonnenhauser

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.