The trajectory of the “Možno ja X?” construction: variation in speech acts of request in contemporary Russian

Abstract

I explore the ongoing language change in which the impersonal modal word možno ‘can, be possible’ takes a personal clause (možno + NOM) as its complement instead of the Experiencer in the Dative case (možno + DAT) and the infinitival clause in the speech act of request in Contemporary Russian. The corpus-based evidence reveals that the construction možno + DAT is gradually being replaced by možno + NOM. I discuss various syntactic and pragmatic factors such as verb class, aspect, transitivity and politeness strategies that motivate the choice of a specific modal construction. Methods of statistical modelling, used to sort out the most significant factors contributing to the choice of construction, show that the most important factor is the date of creation of the text. I propose a scenario for the development of the možno + NOM construction. First, možno began to be used as a tag-question after both infinitive and personal clauses. The requester marked by the Dative has been steadily replaced by the more agentive Subject in the Nominative case. Then, by analogy with the možno + DAT construction, možno was placed at the beginning of the sentence and was reanalyzed as a constructional unit with the following structure: možno + FINITE CLAUSE, in which možno functions as a sentence adverb.