Table Of ContentCognitive Paths into the
Slavic Domain
Edited by
Dagmar Divjak
Agata Kochanska
Mouton de Gruyter
Cognitive Paths into the Slavic Domain
≥
Cognitive Linguistics Research
38
Editors
Dirk Geeraerts
Rene´ Dirven
John R.Taylor
Honorary editor
Ronald W. Langacker
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
Cognitive Paths
into the Slavic Domain
Edited by
Dagmar Divjak
Agata Kochan´ska
Mouton de Gruyter
Berlin · New York
MoutondeGruyter(formerlyMouton,TheHague)
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Cognitive paths into the Slavic domain / edited by Dagmar Divjak,
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ISBN978-3-11-019620-7(hardcover:alk.paper)
1.Slaviclanguages(cid:2)Grammar. 2.Cognitivegrammar. I.Divjak,
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PG59.D58 2007
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Preface
The present volume contains a selection of research on Slavic languages
carried out within the Cognitive Linguistics framework. Most of the papers
were originally presented at the 3rd Slavic Cognitive Linguistics
Conference, which took place in September 2004 in Leuven (Belgium).
Contributions by Barbara Dancygier, Laura Janda and Elżbieta
Tabakowska were later solicited specifically for this volume. All of the
papers have been written or revised with one goal in mind: presenting a
volume of interest to both Slavic linguists and cognitive linguists.
To the extent that we have succeeded in achieving our goal, we are
greatly indebted to the many linguists who have lent us their expertise, be
it on Slavic or non-Slavic languages, in cognitive or descriptive linguistics,
i.e. Neil Bermel, Mario Brdar, Alan Cienki, Steven Clancy, Hubert Cuy-
ckens, Östen Dahl, David Danaher, Barbara Dancygier, Larry Feinberg,
Dirk Geeraerts, Elżbieta Górska, Stefan Gries, Gaëtanelle Guilquin,
Tuomas Huumo, Laura Janda, Robert Kirsner, Wojciech Kubiński, Ron
Langacker, Geoffrey Nathan, Elena Petroska, Anna Siewierska, Michael
Smith, Elżbieta Tabakowska, Willy Van Langendonck and Margareth
Winters. We would also like to express our gratitude to René Dirven, Dirk
Geeraerts, Laura Janda and Ron Langacker for aiding us in taking our idea
from book proposal to final product. Torkel Uggla and Ines Van Houtte
prepared the manuscript for publication – a task that was financially
supported by the Science Foundation Flanders (Belgium) – while Birgit
Sievert walked us through the production process. Last but not least, warm
thanks go to our respective husbands, Torkel and Andrzej, for supporting
our work, both in theory and in practice, as well as to Agata’s mother
Elżbieta Horszczaruk for her assistance in matters of everyday life.
While working on this volume we were guided by the strongly-felt hope
that the wide spectrum of cognitively-oriented research on Slavic data
presented would contribute to the appreciation of both the beauty of the
notoriously complex Slavic languages and the power of the theoretical
tools developed within the cognitive framework. These tools allow a
linguist to tackle language phenomena in all their wonderful complexity
and to enjoy subtleties and intricacies without any need to disregard non-
conforming facts or to force natural language into artifical shapes.
Dagmar Divjak and Agata Kochańska
Sheffield and Warsaw, October 2007
Table of contents
Preface ..................................................................................................... v
Why cognitive linguists should care about the Slavic languages and
vice versa ……………………………………………………………… 1
Dagmar Divjak, Laura A. Janda and Agata Kochańska
Part one. The nominal system: the meaning of case
Nominative and instrumental variation of adjectival predicates with
the Russian copula byt': reference time, limitation, and focalization ... 21
Alina Israeli
Why double marking in the Macedonian dativus sympatheticus? ....... 55
Liljana Mitkovska
Part two. The verbal system: the meaning of tense, aspect and
mood
What makes Russian bi-aspectual verbs special? ................................. 83
Laura A. Janda
Perfectives, imperfectives and the Croatian present tense .................. 111
Renata Geld and Irena Zovko Dinković
Conflicting epistemic meanings of the Polish aspectual variants in
past and in future uses: are they a vagary of grammar? .................... 149
Agata Kochańska
Conjunctions, verb forms, and epistemic stance in Polish and
Serbian predictive conditionals .......................................................... 181
Barbara Dancygier and Radoslava Trnavac
Part three. The sentential system: non-archetypal event
conceptions
Degrees of event integration. A binding scale for [Vfin Vinf]
structures in Russian ........................................................................... 221
Dagmar Divjak
viii Table of contents
The ‘impersonal’ impersonal construction in Polish. A Cognitive
Grammar analysis ................................................................................ 257
Anna Słoń
Part four. Changing language: category shifting
A Frame Semantic account of morphosemantic change: the case of
Old Czech věřící .................................................................................. 291
Mirjam Fried
A prototype account of the development of delimitative po- in
Russian ……………………………………………………………… 329
Stephen M. Dickey
The rise of an epistemic pragmatic marker in Balkan Slavic:
an exploratory study of nešto .............................................................. 375
Eleni Bužarovska
Part five. Motivating language: iconicity in language
Iconicity and linear ordering of constituents within Polish NPs ......... 411
Elżbieta Tabakowska
Discourse-aspectual markers in Czech sound symbolic expressions:
Towards a systematic analysis of sound symbolism ........................... 431
Masako U. Fidler
Subject index ………………………………………………………... 459
Why cognitive linguists should care about the Slavic
languages and vice versa
Dagmar Divjak, Laura A. Janda and Agata Kochańska
1. The cognitive paradigm and Slavic linguistic research
From its early days, cognitive linguistics has attracted the attention of lin-
guists with research interests in Slavic languages (to name but a few,
Cienki 1989; Dąbrowska 1997; Janda 1993a; Rudzka-Ostyn 1992 and
1996). In recent years this interest has rapidly expanded, as can be wit-
nessed by the establishment of the Polish Cognitive Linguistics Associa-
tion, the Russian Cognitive Linguistics Association, and the Slavic Cogni-
tive Linguistics Association, as well as by the many Slavic Cognitive
Linguistics conferences held at various venues in Europe and North Amer-
ica over the last seven years.
This is not surprising, for at least two reasons. First, one of the founding
assumptions of cognitive linguistics has been present in Slavic linguistics
all along: Slavic linguists have always recognized the fundamentally sym-
bolic nature of language and hence the fact that diverse formal aspects of
language exist for the purpose of conveying meaning. One striking illustra-
tion of the close affinities between cognitive linguistics and ideas formu-
lated within traditional Slavic linguistics comes from the relatively early
days of modern linguistic research on Slavic languages. In a study devoted
to the nature of the contrast between the perfective and the imperfective
aspect in Polish, a German Slavicist, Erwin Koschmieder (1934), proposed
two conceptualizations of time which could easily be paraphrased as in-
volving either the MOVING TIME metaphor for the perfective or the
MOVING EGO metaphor for the imperfective (for a discussion of the two
time metaphors see Radden 1991: 17ff). Other examples abound. Tradi-
tional analyses of Polish case by Kempf (1978), Klemensiewicz (1926) and
Szober (1923 [1963]) aimed to provide a full-fledged semantic analysis of
Polish case. This type of work with its emphasis on psychologically realis-
tic explanations, has always been “a characteristic feature of Polish
(Slavic?) linguistics” (Tabakowska 2001:12; translation AK), and contin-
