Author:
Branimir Belaj, Goran Tanacković Faletar
Email:
branimir.belaj@os.t-com.hr; gtanackovic@ffos.hr
Summary
When we talk about the grammatical category of impersonality in the methodological framework
of cognitive grammar, the verbs which designate different meteorological phenomena represent a
very interesting category, which provides a good basis for establishing some fine-grained semantic
and syntactic subcategories. Belaj (2007) describes a conceptual-semantic value of different
syntactic realisations of meteorological verbs such as kišiti (to rain), sniježiti (to snow), grmjeti (to
thunder), etc. Their semantic field is defined as conceptually not easily available, non-distinctive
and hardly definable field with strongly topicalized pure processuality which absorbs its actants.
In this paper, using the same methodological framework, the authors examine a conceptualsemantic
and pragmatic contribution of the initial presentative demonstrative to, which can
sometimes be inserted in such constructions to profile the setting of processes designated by the
verbs of that type in order to describe its syntactic status. In such cases, the presentative
demonstrative to profiles a highly abstract, but, in the concrete context in which the utterance is
created, clearly concretized setting with which the conceptualization of such processes is always
tightly connected. That concretization, i.e. groundedness, is clearly designated by a medial, i.e.
the degree of deixis which signals previous knowledge and conceptual availability of such
designated setting, both to the speaker and the hearer. Since the argument structure of
meteorological verbs lacks good candidates for taking over the function of clausal subject, this
paper examines the extent to which the constructions with the presentative demonstrative to are
analogous to the constructions described as setting-subject constructions in the framework of
cognitive grammar, with the setting profiled as the clausal figure instead of some element of the
argument structure.
Key words
subject; setting; presentative demonstrative; deixis; personal constructions; impersonal constructions
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