S bolshego u menya vsyo khorosho: one discourse marker in the Belarusian variety of Russian

Abstract

The paper focuses on the semantics and usage of the discourse maker s bolshego (more frequent variant) and sbolshego (less frequent one) in Russian speech. The data for the research was gathered from linguistic corpora. The study shows that this lexical unit is a borrowing from the Belarusian language into Russian and is characteristic of the Belarusian variety of Russian. The results of the research demonstrate that s bolshego / sbolshego has gradual and generalizing semantics. The discourse marker indicates partial but sufficient completeness, and highlights the main aspects in complex, ambiguous and multistage phenomena.

Keywords

• borrowing
• loan word
• discourse marker
• semantics
• frequency
• Belarusian variety of the Russian language