THE SEMANTICS OF THE VERB 'PAMIETAC'

The paper addresses questions of syntactic and semantic features of the Pol. verb 'pamietac' (remember). The distinction between the knowledge and memory predicates is pointed out: while propositional knowledge and knowledge by acquaintance are lexically distinguished in Polish (wiedziec 'to know that p' vs. znac' 'to be acquainted with a'), both memory of events and memory of individuals are lexically expressed by the same verb, viz. 'pamietac'. In this respect, the memory predicate shows syntactic affinity to perception predicates, which follows from the fact that memory and perception alike demand an immediate contact of the Subject with an object (resp. witnessing an event by the Subject) at the moment of perception or at some moment previous to remembering the object or the event in question. The specific use of the memory predicate in the context of the modal conjunction 'zeby' is also discussed; it is argued that '(nie) pamietac, zeby p' constructions express, depending on the context (with negation as the crucial factor), epistemic or deontic modality. The specific features of the dative syntactic structures (xNom) pamieta y (Dat P) 'x harbours rancour against y for p' expressing a (negative) emotional attitude of the Subject towards a person, are analyzed and their syntactic similarity to other emotional-attitude predicates in Polish is pointed out. Finally, also metaphoric uses of the verb in question were analyzed.