engleski

Pragmatics and semantics of the verb misliti

One of the key goals of human communication is related to the interlocutors’ trying to ‘make their minds meet’, i.e. trying to make the representations in the minds of the communicators become sufficiently compatible as to allow for the undisturbed flow of communicative exchange. This involves finding a way to make our inner worlds available to others, as well as finding ways to gain insights into the minds of our interlocutors. This attempt to inform others about the (results of) processes in one’s own mind results in constant decisions relative to linguistic choice. Given the above, we find that an analysis of cognitive verbs – in our case the Croatian verb misliti, a verb that is etymologically linked to the naming of a wide array of activities of conscious cognitive processes – might be revealing of a series of communicative and possibly cognitive universals. Indeed, we could assume that misliti serves as a cover term for a great number of activities related to cognitive processes. Departing from this assumption, we propose an analysis of the various senses realized by this verb in the Croatian language. In the study we consider both the pragmatic and the semantic aspects of this verb. The main goal of the study is to find out how the dominant, cover term for cognitive processing is conceptualised in Croatian, as well as to try to distinguish the various sense ramifications. The results should enable future comparisons of this verb with other Croatian verbs that refer to cognitive processes, but also comparisons with the means used to refer to cognitive processing and processes in other languages.

verb ‘misliti’, semantic analysis, pragmatic analysis

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