Compound indefinite pronouns in Slavonic languages. A contribution to a second generation semantic map of indefiniteness

一般来说，代词被认为是一个封闭的词类。关于不定代词，这是有问题的。除了“传统的”不定代词，如俄语kto-to“某人”，kto-libo“任何人”等，在斯拉夫语言中出现了一个由多个正字法单词组成的独特的不确定性表达类别。然而，这些在语言学研究中没有得到充分的注意。它们包含一个疑问代词，如俄语的kto“谁”，并在其基本功能中表达不定指。这种复合不定代词的一个例子是俄语的neizvestno kto，字面意思是“未知的谁”，它可能出现在与代词kto-to“某人”相同的上下文中。这些复合不定代词为我们提供了一个新的视角来研究功能范畴的不定性。本项目具有描述性和理论性两个方面。描述性部分是创建斯拉夫语中不定代词的清单以及对其用法的描述。将涵盖形态句法和语义特征，并收集其使用频率的数据。指称语义学和语义地图理论构成了本研究的理论框架。计划研究几种斯拉夫语，即俄语和乌克兰语（东斯拉夫语），波兰语和捷克语（西斯拉夫语）以及克罗地亚语（南斯拉夫语）。我们的第一个目标是建立这一类别的清单，迄今为止只研究了俄语和乌克兰语。依靠这个数据集，我们计划作出贡献的语义地图的方法。我们的出发点是Haspelmath在1997年提出的不确定性地图。然而，我们并不认为这张地图是一个普遍的语义空间，而是“一个证明变异的模型”。更确切地说，我们的目标是在一个经验规范的语义图和它的扩展对邻近领域。通过整合频率数据，我们创建了第二代地图，即所谓的加权地图。因此，这个项目将是我们对不确定性范畴的理解的一个重大贡献。

Commonly pronouns are considered to be a closed class of words. With regard to indefinite pronouns this is problematic. Apart from “traditional” indefinite pronouns like Russian kto-to ‘somebody’, kto-libo ‘anybody’ etc. in the Slavonic languages emerged as a result of ongoing changes a distinct class of expressions of indefiniteness consisting of more than one orthographic word. These are, however, not adequately taken note of in linguistic research. They contain an interrogative pronoun such as Russian kto ‘who’ and express in their basic function indefinite reference. An example for such a compound indefinite pronoun is Russian neizvestno kto, literally ‘unknown who’, which may occur in the same context as the pronoun kto-to ‘somebody’. These compound indefinite pronouns facilitate a fresh perspective on the functional category indefiniteness. The present project has both a descriptive and a theoretical dimension. The descriptive part is the creation of an inventory of indefinite pronouns in Slavonic languages as well as a description of their usage. Morphosyntactic and semantic characteristics will be covered, and data of their frequency of usage will be gathered. A reference-semantic approach and the theory of semantic maps form the theoretical frame of the investigation. It is planned to examine several Slavonic languages, namely Russian and Ukrainian (East Slavonic), Polish and Czech (West Slavonic), and Croatian (South Slavonic). It is our first aim to create an inventory of this category, which so far has been studied only for Russian and Ukrainian. Relying on this dataset we plan to make a contribution to the approach of semantic maps. Our starting point is the map of indefiniteness as proposed by Haspelmath in 1997. Yet, we do not regard this map as a universal semantic space, but as “a model of attested variation”. More precisely, we aim at an empirical specification of the semantic map and of its extension on neighbouring domains. By integrating frequency data we create a map of the second generation, a so-called weighted map. Thus, this project will be a substantial contribution to our understanding of the category of indefiniteness.