Compound indefinite pronouns in Slavonic languages. A contribution to a second generation semantic map of indefiniteness

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Björn Hansen
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics
• Term: from 2019 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 417111628

Commonly pronouns are considered to be a closed class of words. With regard to indefinite pronouns this is problematic. Apart from “traditional” indefinite pronouns like Russian kto-to ‘somebody’, kto-libo ‘anybody’ etc. in the Slavonic languages emerged as a result of ongoing changes a distinct class of expressions of indefiniteness consisting of more than one orthographic word. These are, however, not adequately taken note of in linguistic research. They contain an interrogative pronoun such as Russian kto ‘who’ and express in their basic function indefinite reference. An example for such a compound indefinite pronoun is Russian neizvestno kto, literally ‘unknown who’, which may occur in the same context as the pronoun kto-to ‘somebody’. These compound indefinite pronouns facilitate a fresh perspective on the functional category indefiniteness. The present project has both a descriptive and a theoretical dimension. The descriptive part is the creation of an inventory of indefinite pronouns in Slavonic languages as well as a description of their usage. Morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics will be covered, and data of their frequency of usage will be gathered. A reference-semantic approach and the theory of semantic maps form the theoretical frame of the investigation. It is planned to examine several Slavonic languages, namely Russian and Ukrainian (East Slavonic), Polish and Czech (West Slavonic), and Croatian (South Slavonic). It is our first aim to create an inventory of this category, which so far has been studied only for Russian and Ukrainian. Relying on this dataset we plan to make a contribution to the approach of semantic maps. Our starting point is the map of indefiniteness as proposed by Haspelmath in 1997. Yet, we do not regard this map as a universal semantic space, but as “a model of attested variation”. More precisely, we aim at an empirical specification of the semantic map and of its extension on neighbouring domains. By integrating frequency data we create a map of the second generation, a so-called weighted map. Thus, this project will be a substantial contribution to our understanding of the category of indefiniteness.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants