engleski

Pragmatics and semantics of the verb misliti

The processes that could be described as belonging to the activity of thinking are primarily limited to an individual, that is, to that which we commonly refer to as the “inner world“ or “inner life” of a person. One of the key goals of human communication is related precisely to the interlocutors’ trying to gain insight into what is going on in the minds of other participants, i.e., trying to make their inner world available to others. This attempt to inform others about the (results of the) processes in one’s own mind guides every linguistic choice. In this sense, the verb misliti is particularly interesting considering that it is etymologically linked to the naming of a wide array of activities of conscious cognitive processes. We can assume that it serves as a cover term for a great number of activities related to cognitive processes and that the analysis of its senses will reveal which cognitive processes are covered by this verb in Croatian. The present study takes into account both the semantic and pragmatic aspects of this verb. The semantico-pragmatic analysis, based on a corpus of contemporary Croatian (also see HansenKokoruš, 2009), has revealed that the verb misliti is used to describe a wide range of cognitive processes. On the basis of these results, a semantic analysis was conducted with the goal of creating a semantic network (Talmy, 2000) of this verb in order to study the core and derived sense(s) and the relations between these senses. The main goal of the study is to find out how the dominant, cover term for cognitive processing is conceptualised in Croatian. The results should pave way for future intra- and crosslinguistic comparisons of this verb with other verbs used to refer to cognitive processing.

misliti, Croatian, pragmatics, semantics

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