Some remarks on the relation of evaluativity and indefiniteness on the example of Czech compound indefinite pronouns
Abstract
According to the recent research of evaluativity (respectively emotionality, appraisal theory or stance), the ability of evaluation is one of the important human skills (Hunston, 2011; Veselovská, 2017). It is generally assumed that in language, one is able to evaluate explicitly (with lexical or grammatical means) and implicitly (with neutral, non-expressive means) (Hunston, 2011).
Among the explicitly evaluative means e.g. the interjections, pejorative lexicon, some affixes indicating evaluation (-ei in German; Dudenredaktion, o. J.) are usually mentioned.
However, compound indefinite pronouns (CIP; e.g. bůhvíkdo 'god knows who' in Czech or neizvestno što 'unknown what' in Russian) also play their role in obviously evaluative texts, but the evaluation component of their meaning is more or less left aside in relevant literature. CIPs are also problematic for other reason.
Pronouns themselves are usually considered as a closed word class. Though, the CIPs are results of different grammaticalization processes and their repertoire seems to be open (Fisun, 2016).
For Russian and Polish, the CIPs have been described by many researchers (Padučeva, 2015; Wierzbicka-Piotrowska, 2007). In other Slavic languages, however, the CIPs were not analysed in depth yet and in relevant scientific literature, there are only few traditional CIPs mentioned (e.g. in Petr et al, 1986, for Czech).
Also a brief corpus analysis shows that the spectre is much broader. The paper deals with preliminary results of research of the relation between evaluativity and indefiniteness on the example of selected Czech CIPs with a different degree of grammaticalization (e. g. bůhvíkdo, kdejaký 'whatever' and jak (je) libo 'as you please') and their counterparts in Russian and Polish.
Firstly, the paper shows the results of corpus analysis in a webcorpus czTenTen. Using the typical collocates of the researched pronouns, it will be demonstrated that the selected CIPs tend to occur in evaluative environment.
However, such method reveals only the explicit evaluation. Secondly, the results of a corpus analysis of translation texts (Intercorp) will be presented.
This method provides an interesting tool to supply the previous method as it demonstrates, whether the translators also consider some non-explicit evaluative statements with CIPs and/or their collocates as evaluative or not. The aim of the paper is to discuss the pros and cons of the used methodology.