engleski

Misliti vs. razmisliti: pragmatics and semantics of thinking in Croatian

Thinking is an activity that is limited to an individual’s ‘inner world’. However, one of the key goals of human communication is to gain access to what is going on in the minds of interlocutors and to enable others to gain access to one’s ‘inner world’. For this reason, cognitive verbs play an important role in our lives and communication, and, in Croatian, among them the verb ‘misliti’ (‘to think’) stands out since it is considered to be one of the basic verbs (if not the basic verb) that is used to refer to the cognitive processes that take place in our mind. However, previous research has revealed an interesting finding – the verb ‘misliti’ is primarily used to refer to a state, in which case the pragmatic senses ‘consider’ and ‘believe’ are more common, and only in about one fifth of instances of its usage it is actually employed to refer to cognitive processes. Our hypothesis is that this is the case because Croatian has a prefixed verb ‘razmisliti’ which lexicalises the process sense. In order to test this hypothesis we analysed one thousand instances of the use of the verb ‘razmisliti’. The corpus used was hrWaC (Croatian web corpus). Our results seem to support our hypothesis since in almost three quarters of the total number of instances of its use this verb is used in the cognitive process sense. Therefore, it would seem that these two verbs have specialised meanings in Croatian: ‘misliti’ is primarily used to refer to states (predominantly pragmatic senses), while ‘razmisliti’ is primarily used to refer to cognitive processes.

misliti, razmisliti, Croatian, verbs of thinking

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