German modal verbs in secondary meaning and their analogues in Russian

Abstract

The publication focuses on modal verbs of the German language in the secondary meaning and their analogues in the Russian language. The specificity of modal verbs of the German language used in the secondary meaning is that they are two-dimensional deictics and convey various types of deictic modal meanings. The purpose of this publication is to describe the typology of the meanings of modal verbs of the German language in deictic use and to reveal the question of functional equivalents in the Russian language. The hypothesis of the study was as follows: the complete functional equivalents of German modal verbs in the Russian language can only be particles as grammaticalized indicators and multidimensional deictics. The following methods were used in the study: comparative method, contextual analysis method, transformational and descriptive method. The study analyzed examples selected from the German DWDS and DEWAC16A corpora, as well as from the National Corpus of the Russian language, from the main and parallel subcorps, in particular. The analysis of statements from the main and parallel corpus of the Russian language made it possible to see that complete functional analogues in the Russian language possessing two-dimensional deicticity can be considered particles  jakoby, mol, deskat’.  Incomplete functional equivalents of the German verbs  müssen, dürfen and  mögen in Russian are introductory words,  sudya po vsemu, veroyatno, mozhet byt’, vozmozhno.  In the case of the use of the introductory word  sudya po vsemu,  the meaning of evidentiality can be traced more clearly, while epistemicity may or may not find its expression: this is confirmed by the fact that sudya po vsemu has no restrictions on syntactic use. When using introductory words  veroyatno, mozhet byt’, vozmozhno,  either epistemicity or inferential evidentiality, determined by the context, is mainly transmitted. A two-plane deicticality and, accordingly, full functional equivalence can be considered a modal predicative dolzhno byt’: it has a value of inferential evidentiality, coupled with epistemicity. The results obtained are important for identifying not only semantic, but also functional equivalence of modal indicators with two-dimensional deicticity in German and Russian.