Open AccessSTYLE DYNAMICS OF THE RUSSIAN WRITTEN SPEECH OF THE 19TH CENTURY: A CORPUS STUDY
Author(s) -
A. N. Baranov,
Dmitrij Dobrovol’skij
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
kompʹûternaâ lingvistika i intellektualʹnye tehnologii
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Conference proceedings
ISSN - 2075-7182
DOI - 10.28995/2075-7182-2020-19-48-61
Subject(s) - utterance , style (visual arts) , meaning (existential) , period (music) , linguistics , semantics (computer science) , point (geometry) , dynamics (music) , modality (human–computer interaction) , literature , history , psychology , sociology , computer science , philosophy , epistemology , aesthetics , art , mathematics , artificial intelligence , pedagogy , geometry , programming language
The starting point of the present paper is the hypothesis that the distribution of discursive words characterizes the trends in the development of the writing style of the 19th century. The paper presents and discusses the results of an experiment based on the data of the Russian National Corpus on the frequency of using discursive words with the semantics of epistemic modality, such as konechno, razumeetsya (both roughly meaning ‘of course’), po-vidimomu ‘apparently’, kak kazhetsya, kazalos’ by (both ≈ ‘it would seem’), naverno ≈ ‘as it were’, veroyatno ‘probably’, pozhaluy ≈ ‘maybe’, deystvitel’no ‘really’, etc. We show that the frequency of this group of expressions increases in the second half of the 19th century. A similar trend is also observed for some syntactic constructions with the same semantics: (ya) dumayu, chto… ‘(I) think that...’; (ya) schitayu, chto… ‘(I) believe that...’; (mne) kazhetsya, chto… ‘it seems to me that’. The revealed regularity is considered as a discursive practice in changing the style of fiction, which consisted in expanding the modus part of the utterance as compared to the earlier period. The discursive practice of expanding the modus was inherent only to a group of innovative writers (first of all, F. M. Dostoevsky, M. E. SaltykovShchedrin, L. N. Tolstoy, I. A. Goncharov, A. F. Pisemsky, P. I. MelnikovPechersky, N. S. Leskov, and I. S. Turgenev), who, however, due to their talent, social significance, and the number of published texts, had a significant impact on the language of fiction. The task of studying the dynamics of artistic style is to identify and describe a set of discursive practices that establish written discourse as such.