Quantitative corpus analysis of implicit evaluativeness: the case of ‘sovershit’sya’ and ‘svershit’sya’ in Russian internet discourse
- DOI
- 10.5922/2225-5346-2025-3-6
- Pages
- 84-97
Abstract
The paper discusses the latest results of the study of pragmalinguistic and proper linguistic mechanisms for expressing implicit evaluativeness of words and expressions of the Russian language in their discursive implementation. The purpose of the study is to identify the features of the pragmatics of the induced evaluativeness in the context of the initially nonevaluative event verb ‘sovershit’sya’ in comparison with the previously considered quasi-synonymous lexeme ‘svershit’sya’. The author's methodology of complex (contentive and quantitative) corpus-discourse analysis is used. The source of language material is modern domestic media discourse. The direct material of the study is the contexts extracted from the newspaper corpora of the Russian National Corpus. At the preliminary, empirical level of the study, according to the dictionary data, it was found that the meanings of the verbs ‘sovershit’sya’ and ‘svershit’sya’ cannot be distinguished, while the analysis of a large block of corpus data showed significant semantic and stylistic discrepancies between these lexemes. The lexeme ‘sovershit’sya’ mainly denotes standard, everyday situations. The lexeme
‘svershit’sya’, in turn, tends to denote situations that have some significance for the conceptualizer — spiritual, social, psychological, moral, etc., both with a ‘plus’ and a ‘minus’ sign. It has also been established that in the aspect of “pragmatics of induced evaluation”, according to the data of quantitative analysis, the verb ‘sovershit’sya’ refers to a neutrally evaluated fact, event or phenomenon, while the verb ‘svershit’sya’ clearly tends to the positive-evaluative attitude of the speaker to the depicted. It is concluded that the method of corpus-discursive analysis of induced evaluativeness tested in the work has significant potential for research objectification of fairly subtle semantic differences between words close in meaning, as well as for recording intuitively felt, but not recorded by dictionaries, evaluativeness, which is implied by the immediate or further contextual environment of the analyzed word or expression.