COMMUNICATIVE USE OF THE VERB MORATI IN THE BOSNIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The modal verb morati is very commonly and frequently used, as evidenced by the data from OK (The Oslo Corpus of Bosnian Texts), which were the subject of analysis in this paper. The deontic use, which accounts for more than 2/3 of the examples, is the primary and by far the most common. Epistemic use is also stable, represented by slightly less than 1/5 of the examples, while the dynamic morati is present in two times lower number of examples. There are very strong and clear general preferences of the verb morati for the present tense and the 3rd person subject, which means that the modal necessity is primarily related to scenarios of the ‘here and now’ type, and that it is mostly objective. Only in the case of epistemic morati, subjective uses outweigh the objective ones. The general tendency for subjective deontic uses of the verb morati to be strong, and the objective ones to be weak, is confirmed. However, it should be stressed that these are only tendencies, not rules. In principle, the modal strength of the deontic morati is strongest with the 2nd person subject, weaker with the 1st person subject, and the weakest with the 3rd person subject. However, various procedures of pragmatic weakening of the modal strength and lowering of the modal degree are very common. It is characteristic for the deontic morati to be used mostly in contexts with a non-specific, unclear, or ‘circumstantial’ deontic source, so that its non-prototypical use prevails over the prototypical. When the epistemic morati is used objectively, it expresses logical certainty, i.e., epistemic necessity based on what is known for sure. The degree of modality is low because the conclusion is presented as the only possible one. The dominant subjective epistemic morati, on the other hand, enables variations in the degree of modality – from categorical judgments reinforced by harmonic expressions (less frequent) to various forms of pragmatic weakening and hedging (more frequent). Finally, dynamic morati is a fairly minor category. The clearest and most prototypical cases are related to a property, feature or strong internal impulse of the subject referent, but more often dynamic morati is used in scenarios that include the force of ‘internal circumstances’ that determine the dispositions for actions of the subject referent or define the indicated situation, thus opening up space for touching and interweaving of these constructions on the one hand, and constructions with deontic morati on the other. Morati in all its uses can come within the scope of negation, but negation (except for ‘mora da’ epistemic construction) can very rarely be within its scope. In this second case, morati is normally replaced by the negated verbs of possibility.