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Analysis of the means of expressing doubt based on the Russian National Corpus

  • Xiaomeng Le ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: March 1, 2025
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Summary

Our aim is to use qualitative and quantitative analyses based on evaluation theory of news discourse from the Russian National Corpus to describe the underlying linguistic features of the means of expressing doubt and to identify some regularities that cannot be detected by intuitive analysis alone. Accordingly, in this article we introduce specialized marker and indirect marker, which were first used by Nikolskaya (2009: 144) in her own work. After analyzing some of the most representative dictionaries, we found that the use of indirect markers of doubt is also typical for expressing doubt (54 such units were found), namely: modal particles of doubt (вряд ли ‘hardly’, едва ли ‘barely’, вроде бы ‘seemingly’, etc.), parenthetical modal words (может быть ‘can be’, вероятно ‘probably’, возможно ‘maybe’, etc.), modal phrases, such as мне кажется It seems to me that’, etc. We try to study their dynamic use and observe differences in frequency and methods of use in the texts of modern Russian-language mass media, and conduct their quantitative analysis.

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Published Online: 2025-03-01
Published in Print: 2025-02-18

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