The Irrealis Use of the Deictic TAM in Contemporary Russian

ABSTRACT

This work seeks to establish the role that the Russian deictic TAM ‘there’ plays in conveying irrealis. TAM has attracted some attention among linguists because of its frequency of occurrence and polyfunctionality. To our knowledge, however, there has been no mention of TAM as described in the present paper. The study explores the semantic and pragmatic features of TAM and argues that this deictic is licensed primarily in irrealis environments (i. e. contrary-to-fact and hypothetical situations, unrealized or future events, negation, commands etc.). This licensing requirement also provides an explanation for other functions of TAM, such as vague approximator, marker of continuation and enumeration, disjunctive connective, marker of indefinite reference and evidential. In a cross-linguistic perspective, the set of functions performed by TAM seems similar to the semantic network developed by several irrealis markers in various languages and echoes the use of deictic spatial morphemes to mark irrealis and future contexts.

KEYWORDS:

• Distal deictics
• irrealis
• epistemic distance
• indefiniteness
• evidentiality
• vagueness

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the participants of the Twelfth Annual Meeting of the Slavic Linguistics Society (Ljubljana 2017) for comments on the initial presentation of this work, in particular Vladimir Plungian, who chaired my session. Many thanks to Lucyna Gebert for inspiring me to think about the evidential functions of Russian deictics, and to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments. Naturally, all mistakes and misanalyses remain my responsibility.

ORCID

Paola Bocale http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5790-990X

Notes

1 Following Diessel (1999, 50), we use the term distal to refer to demonstratives indicating a referent that is located in some distance to the speaker and that are deictically contrasted to proximal demonstratives, which refer to an entity near the deictic centre.

2 Being aware of the fact that there are different treatments of the irrealis, we shall adopt the approach that considers it as a grammatical category in its own right as developed by Mithun 1995, 1999; Elliott 2000; Plungian 2005.

3 In the colloquial language it is frequent to repeat БЫ both after the conjunction and after the verb:

Esli by ona chotela by

If BY she wanted BY

‘. . . if she wanted to . . .’

(Spencer 2012, 217; Hansen 2010, 331).

4 The abbreviations and glossing conventions used in this article follow the Leipzig Glossing Rules. TAM and other particles are given in uppercase. The annotation conventions used in the MURCO corpus were preserved in the examples, including the use of slash characters (single / or double //) to indicate pauses of different length (Grishina 2009b). The original punctuation given in the Radio Ėcho Moskvy transcripts was retained in the examples analysed in this study.

5 http://svpressa.ru/culture/article/174761/ Last accessed 07.08.2018.

6 In addition to referring vaguely to dates, times and amounts, vague approximators can also serve various politeness or relational functions such as mitigating face-threatening acts (Koester 2007). In the communicative contexts associated with the approximating use of TAM presented in this study, it is quite plausible that also politeness strategies employed to reduce face threat play a role in facilitating interactional exchanges between the conversational participants.

7 Markers of irrealis status are employed with numbers or quantifiers to mark approximation also in Mocho (Mayan, cfr. Martin 1998).

8 Mauri understands the term ‘state of affairs’ as a hyperonym for the words ‘situation’, ‘event’, ‘process’ and ‘action’. She prefers ‘state of affairs’ because it does not characterize the entity in any particular sense, whereas ‘situation’ or ‘process’ may convey a static vs. dynamic connotation (Mauri 2008, 32).

9 The connection between TAM and verbs of speech can also explain its frequent occurrence in the combination kak ee/ ego/ ich TAM, which is a lexicalized contraction of the Russian equivalent of the English placeholder whatchamacallit, but with no ‘call’ verb inside (Podlesskaya 2010, 21).

10 https://dnes.dir.bg/comments/pensioneri-ubiystvo-varna-zatvor-22497956. Last accessed 11.07.2018.

11 http://www.gazetawroclawska.pl/polityka/a/po-nie-trzeba-wygrac-w-totka-zeby-byc-milionerem-wystarczy-byc-w-pis-konwoj-wstydu-rusza-w-polske,13248752/ Last accessed 11.07.2018.

12 https://egazeta24.com/article/42232 Last accessed 11.07.2018.