State of the Art

According to the Dictionary of Standard Czech (Slovnik spisovne cestiny [SSC] 2009), pry is a polysemic particle with two senses: in the first one, a modal particle with the meaning of uncertainty and doubt which is caused by the fact that the information is only second-hand:

M. Martinkova (*) • M. Janebova

Department of English and American Studies, Faculty of Arts, Palacky University,

Olomouc, Czech Republic

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© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 63

K. Aijmer, D. Lewis (eds.), Contrastive Analysis of Discourse-pragmatic Aspects of Linguistic Genres, Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics,

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-54556-1_4

(1) Je pry nemocen.

[be:3SG PART ill]

‘PRY [I hear] he is ill.’

In the second meaning, pry introduces somebody else’s direct reported speech. This is exemplified in (2):

(2) Prisel к nam Jan. Pry delej, jdeme do kina

[came:PTC.M to us Jan:M.NOM. PART hurry.up:IMP, go:PRS.1:

PL to cinema]

‘John came to us. PRY [he said] hurry up, we’re going to the cinema.’

The question to be asked here is whether pry carries the meaning of doubt and uncertainty in all of those cases in which it does not introduce direct speech. According to SSC it indeed does, and so it does according to the major grammar books: Komarek et al. (1986, 232), for example, discuss pry in the sections on epis- temic modality, alongside modal particles whose function is to evaluate the degree of certainty of the content of the text or a part of it, i.e. epistemic particles.

In an entry on reported speech in the Encyclopedia of Czech (Encyklopedicky slovnik destiny; Grepl [2002, 375]), however, utterances with pry are considered to be a special type of reproducing an original utterance, alongside direct and indirect speech, and no meaning of uncertainty or doubt is mentioned. This is in agreement with the etymology of the word: historically, pry goes back to the transitive verbum dicendi praviti [to say], which was a full-fledged verb with rich inflection.¹ Pry was originally the 3rd person singular or aorist form of this verb (pravi [say:PRS.3SG] or pravi [say:AORIST]), which later underwent phonetic reduction, via the stages of praj and prej (Machek 2010, 481), and lost all inflections. The latter form (prej) is still very frequent in Common Czech, a variety considered as non-standard (Krcmova 2002, 81).

Grepl notes (2002, 375) that in sentences with pry the original utterance can either remain unchanged, or its form can be modified in a way that makes it similar to indirect speech. For convenience, we will distinguish here between pry introducing direct and indirect speech. Sentence (3) is an example of direct speech as what we have here is the exact wording of the original utterance Privezu ti ndjaky darek ‘I will bring you a present’: the verb is in the first person singular form and its understood subject is the first person singular pronoun, whose referent is “the original speaker” (for the terminology, see Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 1023). The pronominal clitic ti [you] is attached to the verb: ^[1]

(3) Pry privezu ti nejaky darek.

[PART bring:PF.PRS.1SG you:DAT.SG some:ACC present:ACC]

‘PRY I will bring you a present.’

In contrast, sentence (4) exemplifies indirect speech: it adopts the perspective of the “reporter”, i.e. only the content of what was originally uttered is reported, not the form. First, there is a change in the use of the deictic expressions, namely that the pronominal clitic changes to mi [me] (reference is still made to the “reporter”, who was the addressee in the original interchange) and it is attached to pry; unlike in (3), pry is embedded in the sentence. Second, the verb is used in the third person singular form and its understood subject is a third person personal pronoun, which again stands for the “original speaker” (the source of the reported information):^[2]

(4) Pry mi priveze nejaky darek.

[PART me:DAT bring:PF.PRS.3SG some:ACC present:ACC]

‘PRY he will bring me a present.’

As demonstrated in (5), pry introducing indirect speech is not limited to the sentence initial position, but it can appear in the middle field as well:

(5) Priveze (pry) mi (pry) nejaky darek.

[bring:PF.PRS.3SG (PART) me:DAT (PART) some:ACC present:ACC]

‘He will bring (PRY) me (PRY) a present.’

A systematic corpus-based study of the positions of pry is, however, missing,^[3] and corpus-based analyses of pry are scarce. In their study of the collocational profile of pry in the monolingual written SYN2000 corpus of Czech, Hoffmanova and Kolarova (2007, 101) note a high frequency of pry in journalistic texts and also briefly mention the important role pry has in the rendering of dialogues in fiction. In their study of the adverb ddajne [allegedly] in journalistic texts (the AnoPress database), Hirschova and Schneiderova (2012, 2) observe a reporter’s distance from the reported facts not only for ddajne, but also for pry. Importantly, they are the first ones to discuss both expressions in the context of evidentiality, the evidence being a verbal report from somebody else.^[4] Arguably, by making it explicit that the information comes from elsewhere, the journalists try to avoid responsibility for the truth of the reported statement, or to show disagreement with it (Hirschova and Schneiderova 2012, 2).

Though according to the authors both pry and ddajne are evidentials of the hearsay type,^[5] where, as they argue, the source of the reported information is not known (ibid.), their analysis presents numerous examples in which the source is present. This is in agreement with Aikhenvald (2004, 178),^[6] who mentions several languages in which “[t]he same evidential may combine the meanings of a reported and a quotative”. Evidentiality which pry marks is thus - if we borrow Aikhenvald’s (2004) terminology - both reported (i.e. the authorship is not specified) and quotative (i.e. the author is introduced). In other words, example (4) quoted above and repeated here for convenience as (6) can be interpreted as either “He said he would bring me a present”, or as “It was said he would bring me a present”:

(6) Pry mi priveze nejaky darek

[PART me:DAT bring:PF.PRS.3SG some:ACC present:ACC]

‘PRY he will bring me a present.’

The question arises, however, as to how to account for the meaning of “uncertainty” or “doubt” expressed by pry introducing indirect speech, mentioned in the Czech linguistic sources quoted above, namely SSC and Komarek et al. (1986). In general, these types of meaning belong to the domain of epistemic modality (cf. also Komarek et al. 1986), which, according to Lyons (1977, 805) “express[es] different degrees of commitment to factuality”.

Aikhenvald (2004) is quite explicit when it comes to the issue of evidential markers expressing modality: in her opinion, evidentiality “covers the way in which the information was acquired, without necessarily relating to the degree of speaker’s

The difference between hdajni and pry is worth more attention, but it is beyond the scope of the present study.

certainty concerning the statement or whether it is true or not” (2004, 3); she goes on to add that evidentials “may acquire secondary meanings - of reliability, probability, and possibility (known as epistemic extensions), but they do not have to” (2004, 6).

An opposite view is endorsed by Palmer (1986, 51ff.), who discusses evidentially in the chapter on epistemic modality. According to him, presenting the information as something a speaker has been told about is one of at least four ways in which a “speaker may indicate that he is not presenting what he is saying as a fact”. Ultimately, as he argues, all the four ways (the others are speculation, deduction and appearance) “are concerned with the indication by the speaker of his (lack of) commitment to the truth of the proposition being expressed”. More specifically, by using an evidential, the speaker “provide[s] an indication of the degree of commitment” and “qualifies” the proposition “in terms of the type of evidence” he or she has (1986, 54). In this sense, says Palmer, evidentials are “subjective” (ibid.).

The relationship between modality and evidentiality is a strongly debated issue (see e.g. Chafe and Nichols 1986, Willett 1988, and Dendale and Tasmowski 2001); clearly, as Plungian (2001, 354) remarks, epistemic modality is “a domain where evidential and modal values overlap” because it is concerned with the probability of a proposition (P), which indicates that “the speaker has no direct knowledge of P”. As Traugott (1989, 33) notices, “epistemics and evidentials share a great number of similarities in their semantic development, and the histories of items in the one domain can illuminate the histories of items in the other. Naturally, though, it may be useful in some other endeavor, such as a fine-grained analysis of modality, mood, and data-source/authority to distinguish epistemics and evidentials.”

This paper attempts at such a fine-grained analysis. We will investigate whether the meaning of uncertainty or doubt is encoded in the meaning of pry, i.e. whether pry in reporting indirect speech either (a) always carries the meaning of uncertainty or doubt (SSC and Komarek et al.), or (b) whether perhaps two autonomous senses can be recognized for pry introducing indirect speech, or (c) whether uncertainty and doubt are only epistemic overtones, which pry introducing indirect speech may but need not carry.

We will argue for the last option. At the same time, we will resort to Traugott’s concept of subjectification (e.g. 1989, 1995, 2010) as a “a pragmatic-semantic process” and “a gradient phenomenon, whereby forms and constructions that at first express primarily concrete, lexical, and objective meanings come through repeated use in local syntactic contexts to serve increasingly abstract, pragmatic, interpersonal, and speaker-based functions” (1995, 32). In her 1995 paper, Traugott discusses examples “that correlate with change of grammatical status from main verb constructions not merely to auxiliaries (i.e. reduced verbs), but to discourse particles with quasi-adverbial properties” (1995, 36); these examples include, among others, quotative like, be going to, I think and let’s. Typically, Traugott argues, such changes “involve a shift from relatively objective reference to use as markers of discourse reference, i.e. they acquire a metalinguistic function of creating text and signalling information flow” (1995, 39). This, as we believe, is what happened to pry, when it developed from the lexical verb praviti meaning “to say”.

Following Johansson (2007), who argues that “in monolingual corpora we can easily study forms and formal patterns, but meanings are less accessible”, we will look at pry through the lens of another language. Since “one of the most fascinating aspects of multilingual corpora is that they can make meanings visible through translation” (Johansson 2007, 57), we turn to the English-Czech and Czech-English sections of InterCorp (through the search engine KonText),^[7] a multilingual parallel corpus of texts written or transcribed in 39 languages (as of 2016), all of which are aligned with their Czech counterparts. Our aim is to investigate the functions of pry^[8] via its English correspondences in English source and target texts belonging to three different registers.

As a starting point of the corpus analysis, we are interested to see whether the source of the reported information (original speaker) is left unexpressed, as the dictionary definition of pry seems to suggest (Sect. 3), and whether there is a difference between registers in this respect (Sect. 4). Several methodological issues will be raised. Ultimately, however, we are interested in knowing in which registers the correspondences of pry explicate the function of pry as an evidential marker of reported information or whether it is rendered as an epistemic marker expressing a lack of the speaker’s commitment to the factuality of the proposition (i.e. uncertainty or doubt). Section 5 thus delves deeper into the status of the component of doubt in the meaning of pry. More specifically, we question the definition in the dictionaries which see doubt as an inherent part of its meaning. Here we try to outline the pragmatic mechanisms by which the modal overtones of doubt about the truth of the reported facts arise.

• [1] The verb still exists today, but Czech monolingual dictionaries (e.g. SSC) mark it as bookish andobsolete.
• [2] Sentence (4) allows for another interpretation, in which the source of the reported information isunknown; this will be dealt with later in this section.
• [3] There is only a 1951 study by Travmcek.
• [4] Grepl and Karlik (1998, 485) do not use the term evidentiality yet, but they identify a differencebetween epistemic particles such as mozna [maybe] and those which introduce someone else’sopinion: while both are considered to mark a speaker’s stance, in the latter case by making itexplicit that the presented information comes from elsewhere the speaker avoids any responsibilityfor it.
• [5] Like Aikhenvald (2004), Hirschova and Schneiderova (2012) maintain that evidentials are nontruth-conditional. It has been argued, however, that evidential and epistemic adverbials need not benon-truth-conditional; see e.g. Ifantidou-Trouki (1993) and Papafragou (2006). Ifantidou appliesthe embedding tests of truth-conditionality on the hearsay adverbial allegedly; in her test, allegedlycontributes to the proposition expressed, and the same can be said about the Czech adverb hdajne,which translates allegedly. On the other hand, pry does not seem to pass the test, cf. her example Ifthe cook has allegedly poisoned the soup, the police should make an inquiry, which is acceptablewhen translated into Czech by means of hdajni (i), but not with pry (ii): (i) Pokud kucharka hdajni otravila polevku, mela by policie zahajit vysetrovam. ‘If the cook UDAJNE poisoned the soup, the police should start the inquiry.’ (ii) ?Pokud pry kucharka otravila polevku, mela by policie zahajit vysetrovam. ?‘If the cook PRY poisoned the soup, the police should start the inquiry.’
• [6] It has to be remembered, though, that in Czech, as in other Slavic languages, evidentiality is nota grammatical category; Hirschova and Schneiderova (2012) talk about lexical means of expressing evidentiality.
• [7] Both InterCorp and KonText were created at Charles University in Prague. https://ucnk.ff.cuni.cz/intercorp/?lang=en
• [8] Pry, not the Common Czechprej, was selected for the analysis, since its usage is not restricted toinformal registers.