Title: “The many faces of “možno” in Russian and across Slavic: Corpus investigation of constructions with the modal možno”
Supervisors: Laura A. Janda, Tore Nesset
Summary:
Modality encompasses various dimensions, including semantics, syntax, pragmatics, and discourse. Traditionally, research on modality in a specific language has focused either on examining broad domains, such as possibility or necessity, encompassing all linguistic means that constitute them, or on studying the most grammaticalized modal words. This dissertation explores the properties of the Russian modal word možno ‘be possible’ using a combination of cognitive linguistics and Construction Grammar approaches. By integrating this framework, I aim to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the multifaceted nature and interaction of various (extra-)linguistic factors associated with možno in Russian.
The dissertation pursues three core objectives: (i) to investigate the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic properties of možno in different linguistic contexts synchronically and diachronically, (ii) to present the constructional network, considering interactions of možno with other elements within the same construction, and (iii) to offer a contrastive analysis of linguistic strategies for expressing requests in Russian and other Slavic languages.
The thesis consists of three articles and a general introduction. The introduction discusses the results based on previous findings and relevant theories in the light of new corpus data. I also present network of constructions with možno as an anchor in Russian in the introductory chapter.
The first article focuses on the ongoing language change, where the Russian impersonal modal word možno ‘be possible’ takes a personal clause as its complement instead of the Experiencer in the Dative case and the infinitival clause in a speech act of request. The second article explores how requests are encoded in six Slavic languages, namely, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, Serbian, and Ukrainian compared to Russian. I present networks of constructions, taking into consideration factors such as modality type (possibility, necessity), information structure, and politeness strategy. The third article aims at clarifying the semantic contribution of the future copula in constructions with možno, and at the same time seeks to identify contextual factors that motivate the choice between constructions with and without the future copula.
The findings in the articles have implications for several areas of research, including cognitive approaches to modality, Construction Grammar, and the comparative analysis of constructional patterns in Slavic languages.
Defense date: February 23, 2024
Committee: Alan Cienki (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Ljiljana Saric (University of Oslo), Yulia Rodina (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)
Available at MUNIN: https://munin.uit.no/handle/10037/32890