Semantics of the Kalmyk Modal Particle биз: a Case Study of Kalmyk National Corpus and Interview Data

Abstract

Introduction. Studies of Kalmyk particles are topical enough since the latter remain understudied, and it is urgent to identify their semantics for further analysis of their modality category within the examined language; besides, there has emerged significant interest in issues of semantics and polysemanticism as such. Goals. The paper deals with semantics of the modal particle биз ‘probably, possibly, likely, evidently’ that usually expresses doubt regarding the articulated narrative. Materials. The work analyzes texts of Kalmyk National Corpus (http://kalmcorpora.ru) containing 9 million tokens and approximately 7 million word usages. Examples with the analyzed particle биз ‘probably, possibly, likely, evidently’ were selected through the continuous sampling method. Results. The particle бизexpresses semantics of certainty / uncertainty (reliability / unreliability), the latter being of three types: suppositional certainty, suppositional uncertainty, and epistemic certainty. Functionally, it serves to remove assertiveness of a narrative, i.e. neutralizes indicativeness and transforms a real proposition into neutral one. The particle биз marks the category of indirect evidentiality, drawing no distinct line between inferentiality and presumptiveness. In certain contexts, the lexeme can also express — apart from certainty / uncertainty — semantics of positive emotiveness, thus denoting expectation, good feeling and faith in future. Moreover, in some contexts биз grows to lose certainty / uncertainty meanings, becoming reduced to impersonal predicative semantics of assessment of action / condition (of actions / conditions) from intellectual and emotional perspectives.

Keywords

• kalmyk language
• corpus linguistics
• agglutination
• particles
• semantics
• modality
• epistemic modality
• evidentiality