Looking for contextual cues to differentiating modal meanings: A corpus-based study

P. 51–78.

Lyashevskaya O., Ovsjannikova M., Szymor N., Divjak D.

The domain of modality is structurally diverse and may be described in multiple ways (for example, see Perkins, 1983; Wierzbicka, 1987; Hengeveld, 1988/2004; Sweetser, 1990; Bondarko, 1990; Bybee et al., 1994; van der Auwera and Plungian, 1998; Palmer, 2001; Hansen, 2004; Nuyts, 2006; Khrakovsky, 2007). The article reports on the Russian part of a larger survey of Slavic modal words and elucidates the role of formal and semantic context of modal words in a new way. The availability of large corpus data paves the way for study of the empirical reliability of existing classifications originally proposed by philosophers. An important property of the modal words is that they are largely ambiguous, developing new modal meanings both diachronically and from the synchronic point of view. 

 

Keywords: русский язык, модальность, корпусная лингвистика, Russian language, corpus linguistics, modality, русистика, modal words, модальные слова, квантитативная лингвистика, quantitative methods in linguistics, Russian linguistics, quantitative linguistics, квантитативные методы

Publication based on the results of: Конвергентные процессы в истории языка: исследование методами корпусного и статистического анализа (2017)

In book

Quantitative approaches to the Russian language

Abingdon: Routledge, 2018.